Question

I have a server-side templating engine, Jade, which I use to render a layout. When the client receives the layout for the first time, there will only be small subsequent changes in the contents of the layout that may need updating, not the layout itself.

Is there a way to “rerender” client-side by only changing what needs to be updating, and at the same time using the power of Jade.

Answer 1

You can do it via socket.io, I am currently developing the program in node.js to do it and have a working prototype – https://github.com/parj/tableUpdates/tree/tableUpdate

The view is rendered server side using jade. The components that need changing, I send a json from the server side, parse it on the client side and only update the required component using JavaScript.

In server.js, you can see the json in variable currencies I put together and then emit. On the client it is received and handled in public/javascript/buildtable.js

I have uploaded the latest code – server.js runs randomChanges() every second and sends random JSON data to the clients. The clients upon receiving rebuild a table. Hope this is what you are looking for.