Async Support?

[kesne]

Any plans or idea on adding support for asynchronous rendering?

For example, allowing the following example to work.

elementOpen('div', '', null);
setTimeout(function() {
  text('hi');
  elementClose('div');
}, 1000);

[cramforce]

This is typically only desirable for server side rendering. Since our initial goal is to support existing templating languages those could just use their existing string generation instead.

[kesne]

Dust.js is a pretty popular templating engine with asynchronous support. I'm sure there are other engines out there that support async rendering as well.

[cramforce]

@kesne Oh, I've implemented a few of those myself. Just saying it is typically a very bad idea on the client because it leads to uncontrollable re-layouts.

If this comes up as something people want we can make something like this work

elementOpen('div', '', null);
var context = saveContext();
setTimeout(function() {
  restoreContext(context);
  text('hi');
  elementClose('div');
}, 1000);

But I don't see very high priority.

[sparhami]

I would also be concerned about people potentially kicking off a second render while the first is in progress, which could lead to strange behavior.

One reason why I think async rendering generally isn't handled by virtual DOM implementations is that invoking a render again when you have more data usually isn't too bad.

[kesne]

@cramforce I see your concern with it now. I think it's only dangerous if you don't have some sort of control between when re-layouts occur. Though I understand it being low-priority or generally out of scope for the project.

@sparhami That's true, I guess that's the alternative approach to this. Though if you have a cascading async layout it might get less-than-ideal. Although I guess if your site is structured like that you probably have bigger problems...