As you may know, AirBnb opensourced Rendr (http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-open-sourced-rendr) which should enable server-side rendering of Backbone apps. This is cool, because one can run the first "iteration" of template rendering on the server and the client gets fully rendered HTML document plus the whole JS app. It greatly reduces time-to-display and can get us rid of other server-side templating systems.
So, have someone managed to render AngularJS with jsdom or ZombieJS? These dom/browser emulations on Node.js should in theory be enough for simple server-side Angular templating, but results I found googling it were not very conclusive.
Here is another solution: https://github.com/ithkuil/angular-on-server
wiki for details
I'm searching for a solution too. But it's not an option to use browser to render the html on the server and send it to the frontend. Airbnb try it first but rejected because is slow and resource hungry. It's not a production solution.
Update: This soon can be possible with the introduction of Object.observe ;)
AngularJS 2.0 can work on a server, too. Vojta Jina talks about it on "JavaScript Jabber" show #109 - http://javascriptjabber.com/109-jsj-dependency-injection-in-javascript-with-vojta-jina-misko-hevery/ (32:30 in player). There is a link to new AngularJS' dependency injection module - https://github.com/angular/di.js.
This is not performant, but I've been working on a simple PhantomJS server for Heorku that will parse any client JS. I use it specifically with Angular and Rails to serve HTML to bot requests.
AngularJS works withing jsdom context without any tricks. Just add angular.js to js src list and main page of angular app to jsdom on its initializion.
So, rendering is very simple: just use angular in jsdom and it works. Putting it to browser is somewhat harder.
One way is batch syncing DOM changes.
To get dynamical server-to-client updates you may use MutationEvents (unfortunatly, jsdom does't support MutationObservers, but MutationEvents work pretty fast). Use them to stack up DOM changes in accumulator array and push it periodically to client browser (say, per 25 ms).
Also to enable user events, you should track them document-wise on browser and similarry accumulate and push them to server.
One implementation of such approach is jsdom-sync (https://www.npmjs.org/package/jsdom-sync)
A downside of server side rendering is absence of DOM box model size, because to get element width/height it should be actually rendered. Means this solution barely fits for svg and so on..
Also you may consider watching scope model and syncing it with browser-side scopes, but thats totally different story.
i Hope it could still help somone, but here is an npm package I have created:
@dai-shi created connect-prerenderer, see here. Still a few issues but hopefully a good start
If you are looking for a server solution that lives well with Angular - checkout http://mean.io which combines Mean Express Angular and Node.js