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Cloudflare acquires Astro

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Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#31

Post by Vinnl »

embedding-shape wrote: post #10

> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server client" model suddenly doesn…

Whenever you think that everything old is new again and we're just retracing our steps from the past, you risk missing the lessons learned in the meantime.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#32

Post by arcfour »

phartenfeller wrote: post #4

Why does Cloudflare need a web framework? Most obvious would be they think they can make money from hosting astro sites (like Vercel and NextJS). I hope Cloudflare's impact on Astro will be tiny. But another great thing being swallowed by big tech...

This is overly cynical without reason. CloudFlare is hardly "big tech" even if it is a "big" "tech" company. They have no record of killing or abusing open source projects.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#33

Post by verdverm »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #17
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server client" model suddenly doesn…

Yeah, I'm not sure I understand why "islands" isn't just "bits of JavaScript on a static page". It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.

The have Rust now so the entire tooling layer can justifiably be rewritten a few more times

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#34

Post by maelito »

embedding-shape wrote: post #10

> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server client" model suddenly doesn…

> The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.

This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).

It was and will be.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#35

Post by __jonas »

I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there. I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future.

For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS.

But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it.

The issue is here: https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252

I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#37

Post by mpeg »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #17
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server client" model suddenly doesn…

Yeah, I'm not sure I understand why "islands" isn't just "bits of JavaScript on a static page". It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.

The key difference between islands and what we used to do back in the day (js on a static page) is that with an islands approach you architect your site with a components-driven approach where everything encapsulates the js/css/html it needs, then you mark it as an "interactive" island if you actually need client-side js to run – the code is the same, but it either runs only in the server (default) or in both server and client.

I know this sounds similar, but, compared to the more traditional approach, there is a certain simplicity to having everything just be javascript. You can often run the same libraries on both server and client depending on your needs, plus it fulfills the promise of web components in a way that is easier to work with (though WCs have also come a long way!)

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#39

Post by afavour »

embedding-shape wrote: post #10

> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server client" model suddenly doesn…

IMO it's because the web has a huge diversity of behaviors (in a way that, say, native apps do not) but a monoculture on the development side.

React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.

And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#40

Post by giancarlostoro »

__jonas wrote: post #35

I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there. I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future. For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that…

I havent had a chance to fully use it in a project yet, but it is one of my favorite projects only tinker with it, I'm glad it will receive funding to keep it going. It is definitely a solid gem of open source since its not married to one single SPA framework.
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