Partial rendering of front-end, ReactJS based applications on JVM by using Nashorn engine

Web Sites have evolved a lot from static mundane texts to interactive ajax based web sites and today’s Single Page Applications which provides user with a very intuitive experience. React has been one of the front-runner frameworks spearheading this more robust front ends rendering SPA frontend dramatically fast. This has been at the cost of getting down a barrage of javascript in the beginning and rendering it on the fly using the browser’s Javascript and rendering engines. This is counter intuitive to the User Experience goals of a single page application paradigm.

A trivial solution that comes into mind is to push this workload to the server to process this Logic in the back end and send it to the server. This raises the concerns of the requirement of an Isomorphic JS backend such as NodeJS. However, with a back end that utilize Java 8 which comes packing with a much more advanced Javascript Engine - Nashorn, possibilities crop up.

The main idea of this project wraps around finding an efficient paradigm to develop SPA’s by pre-rendering partially or whole HTML DOMs in the back end and delegating the basic DOM rendering of the static or partially static contents to the browser.