Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by joostdecock » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 12:18 PM UTC

c0ffe wrote: post #116

I would not recommend to use Gatsby in a project if it requires a frontend with complexity beyond static-scrollable content. Some problems that I found after some months of integrating it with an existing CMS: * Development complexity: depending if Gatsby is run on development or production mode, React's `render` methods are called in the browser or inside NodeJS. Having this code executed in a Node process is expect…

> I would not recommend to use Gatsby in a project if it requires a frontend with complexity beyond static-scrollable content.

FreeSewing.org runs on Gatsby. It generates made-to-measure sewing patterns, so I think that qualifies as beyond static-scrollable content.

While it's not magic, it is a powerful platform to build your frontend on. JAMStack is a godsend for small open source projects like us since you can just deploy to Netlify and walk away.

We do have a backend (using Express) but it's very minimalistic. Most things are simply handled client-side which means scaling up is a non-issue.

Obviously there are downsides to pushing such an amount of code to the client, but going with JAMStack isa choice we made that we can hardly blame Gatsby for.

I've since written 2 plugins for it for specific needs I had, and contributed some code left and right.I think that's testament to how it's not that hard to wrap your head around.

I've used other static site generators (Jekyl, Phenomic, and brief encounters with Hugo and Hexo) but Gatsby is the first that made me feel I wasn't fighting against it.

Gatsby makes sense for us, as it makes sense for others too. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a way to use JAMStack and is comfortable with using React.

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

#172

Post by misterxi » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 12:32 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #157

azangru wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me offer a real-world example. We were once tasked to build a website for a small publishing house. The site would have pages of books and of authors. Each book page would link to the page(s) of the book's author(s). Each author's page would have thumbnail(s) of this author's book(s). There was also to be an index page, which would contain various books, with names of respective authors, and links to each book's…

I've had a lot of good experiences with Jekyll, and I'm fairly sure that the problem you've described would have worked nicely with it. Extending it is also really straightforward, you just put a few lines of Ruby in a file in the right place. I've moved my site from Jekyll to Gatsby, and while there are some nice things, it's not been a clear win. My site is very significantly slower for first load, but slightly fas…

> My site is very significantly slower for first load, but slightly faster for all subsequent loads.

This can be easily accomplished with Jekyll as well using Service Workers. What Gatsby has done is to take all the good practices and optimisations that can be done to a static site(like image optimisation, asset minification, prefetching) and bundled them all together. A lot of these can be done using any static site generator. For example, Gatsby prefetches links on hover/entering the viewport. This[1] ~1kb JS is sufficient for that.

[1] https://instant.page/.

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

#173

Post by bbx » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 12:32 PM UTC

sings wrote: post #164

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.

It’s probably not unique in that aspect. I just happen to have quite a bit of experience in React. And that “componentization” only made sense to me when I started using React.

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

#174

Post by chrshawkes » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 12:43 PM UTC

I have tutorials on Gatsby and have used it quite a bit. I don't recommend it. I can't understand why this is getting funding? People are so much better off with a CMS like Django or Wordpress. Hell, they could use static HTML, Apache and Quill.JS and nothing else is needed. Maybe sub Quill with TinyMCE or CKEditor. There is nothing overly special about Gatsby.

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

#175

Post by innocentoldguy » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 12:53 PM UTC

sbmthakur wrote: post #161

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.

I can’t speak for the OP, but I like Hugo better than Gatsby as far as static site generators go. I think Hugo is easier to use and is a lot faster at generating sites. Gatsby does more than that, so it may be a good choice when you need something more than a static site generator; however, if I’m going to have to dick around with programming anyway I’d rather work with anything other than Node/JavaScript.

EDIT: I forgot to mention Zola, which I like quite well as far as static site generators go. It doesn’t have the support for multilingual sites that Hugo does, but its templating is much nicer, I think.

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

#176

Post by vorpalhex » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #148

tomc1985 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but the mess that is node and its ecosystem is indeed overly-complicated

It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration sliiightly different. Honestly I go…

I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling, and nothing else. Life is great.

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

#177

Post by innocentoldguy » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

graphememes wrote: post #110

manigandham wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gatsby and Next.js are both site frameworks powered by React. They can both be used for static and dynamic sites with different conventions and features around routing, data management, and general app architecture. Both are "hip" and will likely remain as the top 2 javascript based site frameworks for now, although whether you need either of them is an entirely different question.

VuePress / Gridsome are taking over.

Which, in the JavaScript community, means they’ll be irrelevant in 3, 2, 1.

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

#178

Post by Shinchy » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

cotelletta wrote: post #162

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…

I totally agree with you on the images part, I've been working with Gatsby for a while now and their own image implementation is dreadful. Thankfully you can just use the standard React method.

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

#179

Post by wiradikusuma » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

I checked their website and I still don't get what it actually is. I'm familiar with Hugo (compiles .md files to static site), Forestry (CMS for Hugo and other static site generators) and Netlify (to deploy that static site). Where does it sit, and how is it different?

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

#180

Post by snowwrestler » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

ascorbic wrote: post #138

ta1234567890 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds way too good to be true. Specially considering the stories from other people here, which include a lot more technical detail. Also the other users are not new accounts with just one comment (unlike the user above).

Am I more convincing, with a six year old account? I'm the exact target market for Gatsby, and can confirm the benefits that GP gave. Perhaps I can tell you how I've been selling it to my clients. I work at an agency, which builds sites in the ~$100k range. Most of our clients are currently using something like Drupal, or an ancient proprietary CMS. The RFPs now often specify Drupal "or other open source CMS". We're…

My biggest concern with Gatsby is the build time. Drupal is not exactly known for being fast, and as I understand it, Gatsby asks for the entire site's worth of content for every build, right? How has that worked out for you?

I have Drupal sites with dozens of entity types and tens of thousands of nodes. I feel like Gatsby would have us waiting for an hour-long build every time we want to post a new node.