Quick background

The web development community has been in love forever with the idea of writing code that can be shared across the server and the client. Or maybe that’s just me? Nope, not just me.

We’ve flirted with technology for a while now that we’ve hoped will achieve this holy grail, but recently between node.js and React.js it’s become a reality we can reach out and touch. (er, write. In JavaScript.)

Which means we’re up to the second Hard Problem In Computer Science: naming things.

I mean, instead of “transferring JSON to and from the server without a page refresh” we have AJAX. There’s no way “writing JavaScript that we can run on the Server and the Client” is going to fly.

So far, for lack of a better term, we’ve mostly been calling it “Isomorphic Javascript”. And then arguing about how that’s a terrible term for it.