[okfn-labs] Architecture for a data-driven web app

[Tom Rees]

You don't need to build a whole other app -- Google's crawler goes to a lot
of hassle to ensure it indexes browser-rendered templates properly and can
index hashbang URLs.
There's some documentation here:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started
I've not done this yet but I'd like to hear how you get on. Sounds as
though you need to build the app to respond to ?_escaped_fragment=... in
the URL and serve up a pre-rendered page.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Friedrich Lindenberg <
friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on a web app for some read-only data which should be
> browsable on the web. The whole thing has about 10 domain objects,
> which I'm already exposing through a simple, RESTish API. Now I want
> to make a user interface, which I would like to have two properties:
>
> a) It should be dog-fooding the API
> b) It should be easy to crawl and index for search engines.
>
> I'm not quite sure how to build this: if I use only browser-based
> templating, Google will not index thing properly and I may not get
> working URLs for entries, even using the HTML5 history stuff.
>
> This means the cleanest setup seems to be to build another app, using
> API output but generating HTML server-side. I may be able to make a
> nicer UX by using node.js and sharing some template rendering with a
> browser-based app (like GitHub's file browser).
>
> Is there another way? I'd really like to avoid a full proxy app if
> possible, but can't come up with a good model.
>
> Cheers,
>
>  - Friedrich
>
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