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Cloudflare acquires Astro

astro.build

51–60 of 409 posts

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#53

Damn. What alternatives does HN recommend?

I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#55

I am very disappointed with Astro. Who is this framework for? It's been years, and they still don't support unit testing Astro Actions. They still don't support inter-island communication. "Astro v6 is around the corner" - and the only changes are 1. refactored CLI (why? it's perfectly fine) 2. bumped zod to v4 It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps .…

If all you are writing a blog and you're not using Substack or Squarespace or any of the other million blog hosting options you're crazy IMO.

Substack only really makes sense if you want to monetize your content.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#56

> 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.

It has been funny seeing the tide come in and out now a few times. Though I will admit that each time, the ergonomics get better. AJAX as a pattern was pretty gnarly if you wanted to do a bit more than update a notification badge or comment box.

There's a really nice pattern of using Custom Elements [0] for that sort of JS interactivity sprinkling. You can make your web application however you want, and when you want the client to run some JS, you just drop in `...` with whatever flavour of HTML templating you have available to you. (also possibly with the is= attribute in the future [1], which will let you keep more of the HTML template out of JS)

It saves you the hassle of element targeting and lets you structure that part of your app a bit more without going overboard on "everything is a react component, even the server bits".

Want something "server side generated" in that JS? Just render it in attributes/body/a slot element/a template element, and expect to pick it up in the JS side of things. Feels like how it's supposed to be... and there's no framework required!

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#57

[flagged]

> Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded

Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.

GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

"1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#58

It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.

They get to make Astro -> Cloudflare the default publishing pipeline. Sure users may pick something else, but even if a small % stick with Cloudflare that's an overall win.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#59
post #22

It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.

Same reason vercel buys open source... it makes cloudflare always a great deployment option for all Astro sites, which in turn helps cloudflare's core business. For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nex…

> Nextjs has no support

From what I remember, you can't even run a NextJS app through vite?

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