This is really interesting, although I'm still new enough to node and complex JS apps that I'm struggling to take it all in. That being said, could a hack-ish approximation of what Airbnb is doing be accomplished by rendering the first call of an app in phantom.js and pushing it out in the response stream?
Questions about session state management are popping up in my head but maybe that's some of the secret sauce in the Rendr portion of Airbnb's app.
Great work guys, this is really pushing the boundaries of full stack app development with js.
Author here (spikebrehm). Good question. Yep, you could accomplish something similar by booting up PhantomJS or node-chimera [0] and scraping yourself, but that seems hacky and hard to scale. Justin Tulloss of Rdio talked about this approach in his Airbnb Tech Talk [1], saying that the tricky part is determining when the page is actually done rendering, especially if you have a bunch of JavaScript that's performing DOM manipulation.
Questions about session state management are popping up in my head but maybe that's some of the secret sauce in the Rendr portion of Airbnb's app.
Great work guys, this is really pushing the boundaries of full stack app development with js.