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Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

astro.build

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Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#111

Post by vosper »

robertakarobin wrote: post #109

After having tried and given up on so, so many SSG frameworks, I'm loving Astro. In particular: - Templates are plain HTML/Javascript, instead of some other templating language (e.g. Jekyll/Liquid) - Typescript out of the box - SCSS out of the box - Easy remote builds on Netlify - Scoped stylesheets - No overcomplicated build process/customization (e.g. Webpack) - Supports Markdown, YAML, JSON, all the things - It bu…

Also out of the box:

- Tailwind support

- Optional choice of UI framework (React, SolidJS, Svelte etc...)

- Partial hydration. Generates _actual HTML_ on the server-side rather than JS blobs (which is what some other frameworks call SSR).

It really does work nicely. It's very fast, minimal config required.

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#112

Post by vosper »

eKIK wrote: post #89
CharlesW wrote: post #10

I'm looking at https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/why-astro/ and I still can't tell what's interesting and unique about this as compared to other options in this space. I acknowledge that this might be a PEBKAC situation, but I'd love to hear thoughts from people who used Next.js, Remix, or whatever and found Astro to be a revelation. It seems like Astro's creators believe "content-focused" is a differentiator, but…

While Astro has a lot of impressive features I found that it was the "developer experience" (god I hate that term) that was superior compared to everything I've tried before. With Hugo and Jekyll I always needed to go revisit the docs whenever I hadn't worked with it for a while. I never got to the "oh, I get this tool now" phase, where the content generation could just flow without issues. Publii was cool, but tryin…

> "developer experience" (god I hate that term)

Why do you hate it? It's useful to have a term to differentiate between the experience of the person using the output of the tool (user experience) versus that of the people developing with the tool (developer experience).

Honestly we need more DX improvements in this industry. Especially look at DevOps - the user experience of Chef's output (I'm picking on Chef here, it's hardly the only offender) is servers and services, and the users (other engineers) consuming those outputs can have a nice time. The DX of using Chef, though, can be ughh....

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#113

Post by biztos »

> What People are Saying

> Astro works with the tools you already love, but this requires a lot of effort to get right. Luckily, Astro is supported by some amazing partners across the industry who support our vision for a faster web.

Fast/easy content-focused websites are a subject dear to my heart but far from my day-jobs, so I'm always happy to hear about people making the thing I never quite finish making.

But the above quote is... weird?

The first thing "people" are saying about Astro is it's a pain in the butt, however "luckily" you can spend money on companies to make it less so?

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#114

Post by sbarre »

vosper wrote: post #111
robertakarobin wrote: post #109

After having tried and given up on so, so many SSG frameworks, I'm loving Astro. In particular: - Templates are plain HTML/Javascript, instead of some other templating language (e.g. Jekyll/Liquid) - Typescript out of the box - SCSS out of the box - Easy remote builds on Netlify - Scoped stylesheets - No overcomplicated build process/customization (e.g. Webpack) - Supports Markdown, YAML, JSON, all the things - It bu…

Also out of the box: - Tailwind support - Optional choice of UI framework (React, SolidJS, Svelte etc...) - Partial hydration. Generates _actual HTML_ on the server-side rather than JS blobs (which is what some other frameworks call SSR). It really does work nicely. It's very fast, minimal config required.

As someone who started building web pages in the 90s, the "islands architecture" (generating HTML server-side) of Astro and others makes me laugh because it's literally what we used to do with XMLHttpRequest in IE 5/6 20+ years ago.

We generated page partials (or used static ones) and pulled them in with "Ajax" (for the oldies out there) and then inserted them in the right place on the page using innerHTML.

There's nothing wrong with this coming back around, it worked quite well!

It's just amusing how some things come full circle and are now considered innovative again. I'm sure there are advancements under the hood of course.

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#115

Post by kylecordes »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #67
pembrook wrote: post #26

Is there a static site generator out there that doesn't require a ridiculous build process every time I do an update? Inevitably, when a new "hot" SSG comes on the scene, I try it, and then go back to compare it to the old "hot" SSG from 2 years ago. Yet, I can never get the old test site I set up running again without massive annoyances. This has happened multiple times. As far as I'm concerned, there's zero reason…

Hugo ( https://gohugo.io ) maybe? I tried it for a small static site about internal documentation, and I'm very glad I did. The hardest part was reading the documentation, the installation, content generation and rebuilds were painless.

Hugo is interesting, has significant challenges.

Much of the interesting and useful tooling today is in the JavaScript ecosystem, that you will still have a package.json, Node dependency, etc. Except they are not Hugo’s problem, they arrived via a theme you are using, and they are your problem.

Hugo itself is a pretty lean template system. That means it doesn't know much about building websites. All kinds of things you hope it will know about (SEO, how to plugin analytics systems, much much more), are sitting over in themes in the ecosystem… tangled up with the axis of what visual appearance you want.

So the notion of swapping themes to swap appearance doesn't work, because the theme you picked provides a bunch of functionality in addition to appearance, and a different one will not have the same functionality.

This isn't a complaint, it is a good piece of work with many well-thought-out ideas. But it is pretty far from what the poster was looking for.

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#117

Post by tannhaeuser »

GrahamL wrote: post #20
CharlesW wrote: post #10

I'm looking at https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/why-astro/ and I still can't tell what's interesting and unique about this as compared to other options in this space. I acknowledge that this might be a PEBKAC situation, but I'd love to hear thoughts from people who used Next.js, Remix, or whatever and found Astro to be a revelation. It seems like Astro's creators believe "content-focused" is a differentiator, but…

It's interesting their blog post doesn't mention some of the benefits. Neither does the doc page you linked—at least it doesn't do it succinctly. Essentially Astro lets you build sites using a JS framework like React or Vue without requiring that framework to be loaded on the frontend. By default, components are just HTML content. Super nice for building very fast static sites using a technology you may already be fl…

Not getting it tbh. Why would you go nuclear and develop a React or Vue app and then not actually use it on the browser side? For content-oriented websites there are much simpler workflows based on SGML and other classic markup processing and content management practices. I mean the point of "content-oriented" and web sites in general really is that an expert in the field, rather than a web developer, can achieve useful results as an author.

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#118

Post by yoyohello13 »

SamBam wrote: post #105
shodan757 wrote: post #86

Not to be "that guy", but could you please put the language in the title when posting stuff like this? We all have our language preferences, and I'd rather not have to go digging just to figure out if a project is relevant to me.

It says it's a "web framework" in the title. That generally means it's going to have some kind of templating system, plus html, css, JavaScript, and probably support for other things like markdown and json. Which of these did you want in the title? Or if you mean what was astro itself written in, I think this post is aimed at users of the system, not potential contributors. Personally I dislike it when when a post sa…

When I see "web framework" I think Phoenix, Django, Spring, etc. Which do all require you to write in the associated language. If you said "Static Site Generator" then yes that doesn't imply you need write in a specific language.

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#119

Post by Existenceblinks »

GrahamL wrote: post #20
CharlesW wrote: post #10

I'm looking at https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/why-astro/ and I still can't tell what's interesting and unique about this as compared to other options in this space. I acknowledge that this might be a PEBKAC situation, but I'd love to hear thoughts from people who used Next.js, Remix, or whatever and found Astro to be a revelation. It seems like Astro's creators believe "content-focused" is a differentiator, but…

It's interesting their blog post doesn't mention some of the benefits. Neither does the doc page you linked—at least it doesn't do it succinctly. Essentially Astro lets you build sites using a JS framework like React or Vue without requiring that framework to be loaded on the frontend. By default, components are just HTML content. Super nice for building very fast static sites using a technology you may already be fl…

> using a technology you may already be fluent in.

I think this is the only selling point, given the "content-focused". It's not different than just writing HTML and vanilla js for some interactivity.

Re: Astro 1.0 – a web framework for building fast, content-focused websites

#120

Post by p4bl0 »

pembrook wrote: post #26

Is there a static site generator out there that doesn't require a ridiculous build process every time I do an update? Inevitably, when a new "hot" SSG comes on the scene, I try it, and then go back to compare it to the old "hot" SSG from 2 years ago. Yet, I can never get the old test site I set up running again without massive annoyances. This has happened multiple times. As far as I'm concerned, there's zero reason…

This is one of the reason I built Cigala [1], it's a single PHP script that let you build your website in the admin interface using a WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) that manipulates an SQLite database, and that produce static HTML pages for publishing. It only depends on PHP and SQLite which are available virtually everywhere for free (and in the worst case you can run it locally as the resulting static website can be copied to any static hosting).

[1] https://code.up8.edu/pablo/cigala

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