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Comment by emmab | Hacker News Reader

> The separation of frontend and backend in web development makes a really clean separation that I would hate to combine again.

This was the only complaint made about isomorphic JavaScript, and seems to be a straw man. We can still isolate frontend and backend code even if the frontend code is being run on a server.

There is still a strong incentive to avoid mixing frontend and backend code so as to avoid exposing secret business logic to the client.

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Exactly - when I read that sentence I wasn't sure the author even knew what isomorphic javascript was. Pulling business logic into the front-end is admittedly a bad habit that isomorphic javascript encourages, but it's certainly not a core part of the concept.

Generally you'll have a central API used by iOS, Android, Web etc - isomorphic javascript is a way to make your web app better, not an invitation to create a monolith.

What I want to know is why will isomorphic JS work where other attempts at isomorph-isation have failed. Both the Java and .NET ecosystems have made attempts as this and yet their contemporary development practices for both are back to fully-segregated client and server code.

Also I don't really understand the performance argument. Was that just a strawman on the part of the author?

I think you could still have a lot of your business logic on the backend and probably be best this way. You just call your API to do backend jobs which return results. Your probably not going to do big task processing on the frontend unless that is where the data is stored.

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