Proposal: Socket Engine - Framework and Platform agnostic Angular Universal rendering.

While I personally think that having a separate NodeJS Express server for handling SSR is good solution it’s not always possible to do so in every environment. Therefore we can provide a simple and easily solution that enables Universal on any platform or framework.

Angular Socket Engine

Draft implementation: https://github.com/angular/universal/pull/999 Framework and Platform agnostic Angular Universal rendering.

Usage Server

npm install @nguniversal/socket-engine @nguniversal/common --save

const socketEngine = require('@nguniversal/socket-engine');

// * NOTE :: leave this as require() since this file is built Dynamically from webpack
const {AppServerModuleNgFactory, LAZY_MODULE_MAP} = require('./dist/server/main');

socketEngine.startSocketEngine(AppServerModuleNgFactory);

This will the socket engine which internally hosts a TCP Socket server.
The default port is 9090 and host of localhost You may want to leave this as a plain .js file since it is so simple and to make deploying it easier, but it can be easily transpiled from Typescript.

Usage Client

Your client can be whatever language, framework or platform you like.
Aslong as it can connect to a TCP Socket (which all frameworks can) then you’re good to go.

This example will use JS for simplicity

import * as net from 'net';

const client = net.createConnection(9090, 'localhost', () => {
  const renderOptions = {id: 1, url: '/path',
    document: '<app-root></app-root>'} as SocketEngineRenderOptions;
  client.write(JSON.stringify(renderOptions));
});

client.on('data', data => {
  const res = JSON.parse(data.toString()) as SocketEngineResponse;
  server.close();
  done();
});

GRPC Engine

Draft implementation: https://github.com/angular/universal/pull/1003 Another proposed implementation thats very similar to the above Socket Engine, but instead of using a TCP Socket as the transport it uses GRPC.
This will make consuming it much easier since we can provide the .proto file and you’re good to go.

Feel free to discuss advantages of both implementations.

[dherges]

When you ask for “when is it ready?” ask first “what could I do to make it quicker/better?”

[Toxicable]

@lionskape We’re happy to hear why one might be better than the other. We may also end up implementing both, since they’re simply implementations of an Interface they’re relatively easy to maintain