Server Side Rendering

[smfoote]

Tornado templates should be able to render on the server with Node. There are Node implementations of the DOM API (e.g. simple-dom) that should get us most of the way there, but there are still a few things lacking.

• tornado#render may need to return a promise that resolves when all internal promises have resolved, because values that resolve after the server responds would otherwise not be included in the HTML payload.
• simple-dom does not support the innerHTML property, which is used within the Tornado runtime, and seems like the easiest way to turn the DOM returned by Tornado into a string.
• because Tornado creates DOM instead of strings, it seems like streaming (and thus early flush) is not possible. This needs further investigation.

[smfoote]

The new version of the compiler allows us to compile to whatever we want (or compile to one language in different ways). We should consider this as a part of our SSR discussion.

[smfoote]

Although simple-dom doesn't support innerHTML and outerHTML, it does have a method for turning an HTML Node into a string: HTMLSerializer#serialize.

An example of how to implement innerHTML using serializer can be found in the Riot project

[smfoote]

A working version of SSR can be found at #102