This blog post is a snippet from my Cascading Asynchronous Javascript and HTML (AJAH) Regions sketch that was recently published to Google Drive.
Follow Up – February 2015
Looking back on this, it’s basically a concept for how to implement self-contained, hierarchical web components similar to ReactJS or Polymer, instead presenting a framework for single-page apps with PHP/JS.
A Google Tech Talk from June 2010 describes a method called “Block Rendering” which is the very same idea I’ve outlined above.
You might say this pattern is very BEM-like. It even realizes server-side rendering on first page load, far before it ever became a trend. Tom Dale has a long post about that here. This concept has always been a logical optimization though, it’s nothing new or magic. We’ve had the ability to render Javascript apps server-side for over a decade…
I’m now experimenting with pure Javascript apps (serverless / no PHP), but the lessons learned from this design pattern and the project that spawned it will definitely come into play at some point as I focus my developments on Rapid.js.