Simple TSX VDom Server Side Rendering

A simple implementation of server-side rendering HTML for simple-tsx-vdom.

Note: This is not intended for production nor as a proper replacement for more complete solutions like React or Preact.

Install

To get from npm simply run.

npm install --save simple-tsx-vdom-ssr

You will also need simple-tsx-vdom installed as it is a peer dependency.

Features

• Small file size about 1kb after compression.
• No other dependencies other than simple-tsx-vdom.
• Written in Typescript..
• Simple API, implements a simple in-memory DOM for simple-tsx-vdom that can then be turned into a string.

Example

import { vdom, render, VDom, FunctionalComponent } from "simple-tsx-vdom";
import { SSRDomDocument } from "../../src";

const ssrDomDocument = new SSRDomDocument();
const ssrVDom = new VDom(ssrDomDocument);
VDom.current = ssrVDom;

const Navbar: FunctionalComponent = () =>
    <nav>
        App Name
        <button onclick={() => console.log('About')}>About</button>
        <button onclick={() => console.log('Help')}>Help</button>
    </nav>;

const Footer: FunctionalComponent = () =>
    <footer>
        Alan Lawrey {new Date().getFullYear()}
    </footer>;

const App = <main>
    <Navbar />

    <h1>Title</h1>
    <p style={{'background-color': 'red'}}>Hello</p>
    <p style={{margin: '5px'}}>Whats up?</p>

    <Footer />
</main>

const parent = SSRDomDocument.emptyElement();

render(App, parent);

console.log(parent.hydrateToString());

// Console will output the HTML in a single line, formatted here for readability
// <main>
//     <nav>
//         App Name
//         <button>About</button>
//         <button>Help</button>
//     </nav>
//
//     <h1>Title</h1>
//     <p style="background-color:red;">Hello</p>
//     <p style="margin:5px;">Whats up?</p>
//
//     <footer>Alan Lawrey <!-- -->2021</footer>
// </main>

In the above example you can see that there is a <!-- --> in the footer. This is one of the parts that makes this specifically for server side rendering and then hydration on the frontend. The comment tag allows for breaking up between sequential text nodes that would other wise appear as a single text node when the browser parses the HTML.

You can also see that there's no attempt to output event handlers for the buttons, which again should be handled by hydration on the frontend where all the elements should be used as sent from the server and event handlers attached.

What About Just Rendering To String?

In the above example you can see that the method is called hydrateToString which will put <!-- --> between text nodes, for simply rendering to string there is another method renderToString.

If we change that line in the above example it would look like this:

console.log(parent.renderToString());

// Console will output the HTML in a single line, formatted here for readability
// <main>
//     <nav>
//         App Name
//         <button>About</button>
//         <button>Help</button>
//     </nav>
//
//     <h1>Title</h1>
//     <p style="background-color:red;">Hello</p>
//     <p style="margin:5px;">Whats up?</p>
//
//     <footer>Alan Lawrey 2021</footer>
// </main>

License

MIT

Author

Alan Lawrey 2021