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Cloudflare acquires Astro

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Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#71

Post by Terretta »

pjmlp wrote: post #57
MarkusAllen wrote: post #46

[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/…

Not sure it's dreams to say "community-funded". Depends on terminology.

The funding assertion leverages the re-definition of “community” in “community funded” and relates to why all those big projects offer CE or Community Editions instead of calling it free or open source editions.

Enterprises are willing to take a look at free, but "community editions" are clearly for peons, not the big boys, so they license the commercial edition. It also productizes a subset of licensing rights in contrast with the commercial licensing rights.

In any case, in today's common parlance, community doesn't mean ICs and IC donations. It can, but it's been mostly co-opted by corp donations, which are still donations and not VC.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#72

Post by mpeg »

jtbaker wrote: post #59
mpeg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, that's part of the problem, deploying nextjs to cloudflare in the first place used to be an absolute nightmare, let alone the dev experience (I think it's better now)

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#73

Post by ascorbic »

azangru wrote: post #26
quentindanjou wrote: post #16

After Netlify acquired GatsbyJS, I am not very hopeful about the future of Astro. I hope to be wrong because Astro is a great framework.

It still baffles me why Netlify did that. Gatsby seemed to have already been dying, even before the acquisition; and it didn't look like Netlify was planning to invest in it.

Netlify didn't buy Gatsby for the framework. They wanted the hosting business and the GraphQL thing. They said this at the time, and it's true. It was barely resourced. Cloudflare is only interested in the framework (because Astro has nothing else).

Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#74

Post by afavour »

timeon wrote: post #69
afavour wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ta…

> Users get by with it. They would not if they had choice.

And they don't. Web development practices are largely driven by what developers want, not what users want. Which is why Google started doing things like measuring Core Web Vitals and having it affect SEO rankings, to force developers to care.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#75

Post by mpeg »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #66
mpeg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On inter-island communication, I actually think less is more – I find a lot of the recent big features like this they have added unnecessarily constrain you to doing things a certain way, while the reason I liked Astro in the first place was the simplicity. You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people sti…

Astro component is your page's entry point. It's similar to React server component. The typical flow is to fetch data in it, and pass the data to client component written in React or whatever. You can also have pages that are Astro only, without any front-end framework.

Yeah, I know, but since by default the front-end islands are server-rendered with no hydration the lines are blurred between what you would use an .astro component for, and just using for example react.

Personally I only ever use .astro components if I'm 100% sure I will never need any client side interactivity, otherwise it's just easier to ignore them.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#76

Post by charleszw »

mpeg wrote: post #37
philipwhiuk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I will also say encapsulating everything you just said in a single term, "islands," is a lot simpler and prettier to discuss. At least from my perspective, the naming also makes a lot of sense. Literal islands of interactivity surrounded by an ocean of static.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#77

Post by [deleted] »

shimman wrote: post #43
__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…

It's not complaining when said OSS project has taken $10+million in VC funding, at that point it becomes a matter of priorities and by explicitly ignoring a major issue the owners are telling you exactly what they care about (capturing that bag, not helping users).

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#79

Post by Squarex »

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…

What is the preffered way to do the opposite now? Not every webapp should be architected as an website.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#80

Post by azangru »

ascorbic wrote: post #73
azangru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still baffles me why Netlify did that. Gatsby seemed to have already been dying, even before the acquisition; and it didn't look like Netlify was planning to invest in it.

Netlify didn't buy Gatsby for the framework. They wanted the hosting business and the GraphQL thing. They said this at the time, and it's true. It was barely resourced. Cloudflare is only interested in the framework (because Astro has nothing else). Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare

Why did they want Gatsby's graphQL thing? What was attractive about it?
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