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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

#181

Post by tashoecraft »

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.

I think it's something about developers who only use React that think React is extremely unique. I hear stuff like this all the time, "How do you use redux with Angular" like redux couldn't possible apply to anything else. Pretty much all the frameworks provide a component based architecture, this isn't a unique thing to react. You choose react for it being extremely popular, JSX, relatively small footprint (unless you start using it as a framework).

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

#182

Post by patrickaljord »

andrethegiant wrote: post #137
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…

> Users hate not being able to immediately see how their content will look like Shameless plug: I'm building a product that does what Gatsby Preview does, except it's platform agnostic, and ties in tighter wth the feedback/review process. https://featurepeek.com

That's actually pretty cool.

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

#183

Post by srirachafari »

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…

Yeah I dont think their target market is established enterprise commerce companies

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

#184

Post by lhorie »

azangru wrote: post #144
lhorie wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has both used Gatsby and written custom static HTML generators, I do feel that Gatsby is far more complex than it needs to be. > there's no way your "couple hundred lines of code" addressed more than a fraction of the real-world use cases addressed by Gatsby Gatsby on its own doesn't actually do much. There are plugins to do most useful things. Here's an example: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsb…

> And don't even get me started on migrating from Gatsby 2 to 3 I would actually love to get you started on this point. I have not heard of Gatsby 3. As far as I'm aware, Gatsby v2 is the latest. How do you migrate to 3?

Oops, I meant from 1 to 2. I recalled there being three majors, but got mixed up because the first is the 0.x not 1.x

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

#185

Post by petra »

cies wrote: post #165
petra wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, database driven WP features, don't work - As they should.

You just need to select your plugins from a smaller set, and use external services like disqus for database based service.

And i think with time that thinking could lead to a set of plugins with good security through isolation.

As for hosting complexity - for many sites, this could be hidden from the developer and the client.

And regarding code complexity - how often are custom wordpress plugins or themes(without a site builder) required ? and how much developer time does it take ?

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

#186

Post by lhorie »

rymate1234 wrote: post #130
lhorie wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has both used Gatsby and written custom static HTML generators, I do feel that Gatsby is far more complex than it needs to be. > there's no way your "couple hundred lines of code" addressed more than a fraction of the real-world use cases addressed by Gatsby Gatsby on its own doesn't actually do much. There are plugins to do most useful things. Here's an example: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsb…

They have some legitimate reasons for the Gatsby specific CSS -- specifically because everything needs to be available at build time, and I assume the prismjs library depends on browser APIs that may not exist at build time. It's also not too surprising to hear that it doesn't support code highlighting out of the box in React given it's a plugin for Gatsby's remark plugin. However, because we added prismjs as a depen…

The problem is that the way Gatsby uses React is different from the way most people use React. If you just use Prism the way you linked, you'll get an error about the DOM not being there (because with Gatsby, the code is running in Node). You need to use the `Prism.highlight()` API (which takes a string and returns a string) and AFAIK the only reasonable way to consume the output of that from React is through dangerouslySetInnerHtml.

I'd be happy if you could point me to a way to use Prism w/ Gatsby that isn't as hacky.

The React-on-server aspect actually has a somewhat profound impact on what you can do. For example, if you have a newsletter subscription component in some other project, there's an almost 100% chance that it won't work in Gatsby because it likely relies on some DOM-related API like onSubmit or onClick

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

#187

Post by fiatjaf »

In a dozen of hours I wrote Sitio[1]. Sitio generates static pages with React templates and if wanted they also become alive React components at the client. It has a simple imperative API, no GraphQL, no Webpack, any kind of datasource can be easily plugged (in fact I did plug many).

It turns out Gatsby also exposes an imperative API that runs behind its fancy declarative API, and it's very similar to mine.

However, I wrote mine in 12 hours. Gatsby has a big team and millions of dollars and it's been in the works for many many years.

And still some weeks ago I tried to use Gatsby to generate a site with data from Trello and Instagram and couldn't, hit some bugs, but mainly hit an opaque and very complex API.

Why?

[1]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio

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

#189

Post by fiatjaf »

calcsam wrote: post #28

Gatsby co-founder here. We're super excited for this so we can make Gatsby even more awesome. Happy to answer any Qs!

What needs to be done in Gatsby after so many years of intense development? Is it really so complicated to finish a program that generates HTML sites?

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

#190

Post by kls »

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?

For almost any stack, you could use Puppet and headless chrome, it's a fairly simple setup. Pump it thru headless chrome and store the static output.

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/puppeteer/articles/s...

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