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Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

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Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#161

Post by sbmthakur »

csande17 wrote: post #81

I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train. 2. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework a…

> I don't really like Gatsby's product

May I know why you don't like it and what alternatives you will recommend (if any)? I am considering Gatsby for building a site.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#162

Post by cotelletta »

tyingq wrote: post #93

A static page framework that shoves content into a client side graphql store and then extracts bits out to render a page? It's popular, so I can't say it was a bad idea. I guess I'll just say I must be old because it sounds like satire.

The really dumb part is that GraphQL has more restrictions than JSON on property names, so you can't actually render arbitrary JSON data with gatsby without breaking the GraphQL schema and getting a ton of errors.

It seemed nice at first, but the way they tell you to deal with images and other resources is ridiculous overengineered and gets in the way.

If you throw real data at it, your builds explode from seconds to minutes.

Ill considered, chasing too many fads, and the inability to turn it all off if you don't need it.

That's what gatsby felt like.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#163

Post by kilburn »

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #160
kilburn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR: I just completed a large project built with Gatsby, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The technology is extremely complicated, and the end result quite inflexible. Here's an idea of how the whole thing works when you have non-technical users: 1. You need some sort of Content Management System for non-technical users to be able to create content. 2. That CMS stores the content however it sees fit (db/files/wh…

"now Gatsby inlines ALL of the site's css in each and every page" Did this abruptly happen at some point? I've had attempts to migrate components from old repositories cause similar issues and all I could see is that something with the dependencies of that project (e.g. "tree-model" definitely seemed to cause issues) were forcing gatsby to be overly safe in terms of culling CSS. Similarly we had issues with imports a…

> "now Gatsby inlines ALL of the site's css in each and every page" Did this abruptly happen at some point?

It happened in gatsby @2.1.3 (a minor "patch" release!) [1]

> would probably try next.js next time just to know what I've been missing. Have you worked with it before doing similar stuff?

Not at the same scale. However, just reading their docs gives me way more confidence in that they are explicit about what the thing does or doesn't do. For instance, they can do prerendering like gatsby but there are many warnings about it in the docs [2], and you can always fall back to per-request SSR on any page if prerendering doesn't work there.

Also it does away with the whole graphql thingy (you just get a `fetch` that works both server-side and client-side) and call the "backend" api directly.

[1] https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues/11072 [2] https://nextjs.org/docs#automatic-prerendering

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#164

Post by sings »

bbx wrote: post #141

I really love Gatsby. It combines the best of both worlds: static sites and React. For a very long time, I've been fond of Jekyll. It's mostly because my open source projects are hosted on GitHub and Jekyll is their go-to framework. There's nothing wrong per se with Jekyll. I was simply missing some features from React. When I was working on React apps, the main benefits for me were: (i) component encapsulation and (…

Honest question, but why is React unique in offering component encapsulation? I see this more of a structural paradigm than something a framework allows for or limits against.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#165

Post by cies »

petra wrote: post #151
csande17 wrote: post #81

I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train. 2. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework a…

It should be pretty easy to auto-generate static sites from wordpress. Shifter and HardyPress already do so. That gets you all the advantages of static sites, combined with all the advantages of WordPress(ecosystem, tools, affordable labor, easy to use by clients). Their only major limitation is that they generate/"compile" the whole site, and this takes time. But that seems solvable by caching(in most cases) and by…

A lot of WP features do not work in this case. The infra need to get this working is also not simple. And finally the code produced to get this to work (the mess of "hooks" called filters in WP iirc) does not at all resemble the clean React code base of my Gatsby website project.

I argue maintainability is the main reason for me to choose Gatsby over WP for projects where the choice makes sense.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#166

Post by cies »

onion2k wrote: post #135
gexla wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over The Gatsby homepage mentions Wordpress as a possible data source. I don't evens see mention of their CMS on the front page. The only "service" I see them advertising there is Preview - which seems to be a development collaboration tool. I don't think they're convincing people to move away from Wordpress. It's funny that the article talks about moving away from…

Content managers like WordPress and have lots of experience with it. Using it as a backend is fine. Gatsby on the frontend has advantages (speed, security, etc). Combining the two makes a lot of sense.

Yes. It does. And it means you will use WP in a head-less setup.

The main problem is not using a large part of your WP codebase (so much for lean and mean) and that some features in WP dont work as expected.

Now you may want to keep WP up to date and the cost for this may be bigger then a head-less SaaS CMS.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#167

Post by joking »

dunerat wrote: post #125
graphememes wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except a couple hundred lines of code could address the issues that Gatsby addresses. The posters here aren't wrong. It is an overhyped, overbloated, overconfig heavy stack that ultimately renders static html. I have used them, they are exactly as these posters say.

do you have any suggestions for people like myself, who aren't interested in or are not capable of building their own proprietary static site generator? Any tools that meet similar needs to those that gatsby meets that you would recommend and why?

What language / stack do you know or use the most? go to staticgen.com and filter by your preferences. I used sculpin as it's really simple and for static landing pages you don't have to mess with many things. I tried gatsby, and to include an script on the head (the gtm js) you have to use a plugin or escape the script and include on helmet. I also used docfx indirectly to make automatic documentation pages for dotnet apis and it worked flawlessly, however I didn't have to do anything special on it, which is where the problems start to appear.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#168

Post by k__ »

lsalvatore wrote: post #86
csande17 wrote: post #81

I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train. 2. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework a…

Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?

At least in the React eco-system I got the feeling that Gatsby does mostly it's own thing.

You can setup a Next.js system with mostly regular React skills.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#169

Post by joking »

arcturus17 wrote: post #152
arcturus17 wrote: post #123

I’ve been playing with Gatsby on toy projects, and recently I’ve considered using it in prod in an eCommerce site. Then I saw that the content preview feature was $50 / month - and it’s not even integrated yet with my CMS of choice. How can teams accept to let go of such fundamental features? I love the React dev experience as much as the next guy, but I certainly can’t find a way to justify this to my clients...

Apologies for the double comment but another flaw I’ve seen with Gatsby in eCommerce has to do with fetching the product listings... You basically have two options: (a) fetch them dynamically (b) trigger a rebuild on product update With (a) you have spinners and potentially worse SEO. With (b) you have to deal with a delay from hitting “Publish” to seeing the changes deployed in prod... Again, these are all solved pr…

I don't see a good fit between and ecommerce site and gatsby, on an ecoomerce site you may have to change your pages depending on the stock, and disable the buy button when there's no stock for an item. What are you going to do? redeploy the site on every purchase?

Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsby.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#170

Post by arcturus17 »

joking wrote: post #169
arcturus17 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for the double comment but another flaw I’ve seen with Gatsby in eCommerce has to do with fetching the product listings... You basically have two options: (a) fetch them dynamically (b) trigger a rebuild on product update With (a) you have spinners and potentially worse SEO. With (b) you have to deal with a delay from hitting “Publish” to seeing the changes deployed in prod... Again, these are all solved pr…

I don't see a good fit between and ecommerce site and gatsby, on an ecoomerce site you may have to change your pages depending on the stock, and disable the buy button when there's no stock for an item. What are you going to do? redeploy the site on every purchase? Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsb…

Yea, essentially what I'm saying in my a vs b scenario.

> Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsby.

And you still haven't solved the issue of delays between content changes and deployment... What if someone has made a bad mistake in content editing and you need to revert it? You're exposed to the whims of your build processes and infrastructure... There's no way I can sell to anyone who's played with Wordpress or Shopify "well, your changes might take anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes to be live..."

That's why I'm asking, how can product and engineering teams justify this kind of thing? I'm not being facetious, I'd love to hear their perspective.

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