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Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

websmith.studio

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Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#72

Post by paintbox »

rckt wrote: post #24

> I've found Astro perfect for marketing sites, blogs, e-commerce catalogues, and portfolio sites Basically, not suitable for anything complex.

That's the point. It's a war on recentish industry standard to develop all projects using same tools made by/for huge organizations working on huge projects.

Same thing happened with microservice architecture.

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#73

Post by abound »

pentagrama wrote: post #67

But it has a CMS? The author said that replaced WordPress sites with Astro, and on https://astro.build/ I see a comparison to WordPress. Astro brings a friendly UI to maintain and update the sites? Like the WordPress panel and editor.

Not sure if anything major has changed recently, but I think you bring your own CMS. I've used Astro successfully with Strapi, for example.

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#74

Post by rustc »

kh_hk wrote: post #50

To me no, it's not. It works well for some of the use cases, but if all you needed was offline rendering of your js in a build step to generate static html then you really didn't need all that js to begin with. islands work until they don't, and a lot of stuff gets inlined too. I guess it's fine if you stop caring about the final build. I feel a lot of the hype around Astro has more to do with vite than anything else…

> islands work until they don't

Like when?

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#75

Post by rustc »

steve_taylor wrote: post #40
rasmus1610 wrote: post #29

I recently build a website for a medical practice using Astro. I was amazed by how easy it was compared to my experience with Wordpress for this several years ago. And I can host it for free on something like Netlify and I don’t need to worry about the site being hacked, like with WP. I even built a very simple git-based CMS so that the client can update the content themselves. Web dev has really come a long way, des…

Be careful with Netlify. Their bandwidth charges are even more egregious than Vercel’s.

> Be careful with Netlify. Their bandwidth charges are even more egregious than Vercel’s.

$550/TB for those who want to save a search.

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#76

Post by input_sh »

zffr wrote: post #41
sublinear wrote: post #28

> When I say Astro sites are fast, I mean properly fast. We're talking 40% faster load times compared to traditional React frameworks. That's a really low bar. Why not static pages? Why even use a framework at all if you're thinking of using Astro?

How do you do server-side rendering without a framework? If you use static pages, how do you make sure that shared UI like navbars all update if you decide to make a change?

Pretty much every static site generator has an option of splitting a page into reusable components, so something like:

    
        {% include "components/head.html" %}
        
            {% include "components/navbar.html" %}
            ...
Some even allow you to pass variables, so something like:

    {% include "components/button.html" text="example" url="https://example.com" %}

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#77

Post by hasanhaja »

steve_taylor wrote: post #30
diggan wrote: post #10

> Traditional frameworks hydrate entire pages with JavaScript. Even if you've got a simple blog post with one interactive widget, the whole page gets the JavaScript treatment. Astro flips this on its head. Your pages are static HTML by default, and only the bits that need interactivity become JavaScript "islands." Back in my days we called this "progressive enhancements" (or even just "web pages"), and was basically…

Back in your day, there wasn’t a developer experience by which you could build a website or web app (or both) as a single, cohesive unit, covering both front-end and back-end, while avoiding the hydration performance hit. Now we have Astro, Next.js with RSC, and probably at least a dozen more strong contenders.

> there wasn’t a developer experience by which you could build a website or web app (or both) as a single, cohesive unit, covering both front-end and back-end

How much of the frontend and how much of the backend are we talking about? Contemporary JavaScript frameworks only cover a narrow band of the problem, and still require you to bootstrap the rest of the infrastructure on either side of the stack to have something substantial (e.g., more than just a personal blog with all of the content living inside of the repo as .md files).

> while avoiding the hydration performance hit

How are we solving that today with Islands or RSCs?

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#79

Post by rasmus1610 »

ewuhic wrote: post #34
rasmus1610 wrote: post #29

I recently build a website for a medical practice using Astro. I was amazed by how easy it was compared to my experience with Wordpress for this several years ago. And I can host it for free on something like Netlify and I don’t need to worry about the site being hacked, like with WP. I even built a very simple git-based CMS so that the client can update the content themselves. Web dev has really come a long way, des…

Were you commissioned by a friend? How does one find a gig building a medical practice website?

I’m a doctor myself and thus have contacts to people having medical practices :)

But at least in Germany there are some agencies doing nothing else.

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#80

Post by rasmus1610 »

steve_taylor wrote: post #40
rasmus1610 wrote: post #29

I recently build a website for a medical practice using Astro. I was amazed by how easy it was compared to my experience with Wordpress for this several years ago. And I can host it for free on something like Netlify and I don’t need to worry about the site being hacked, like with WP. I even built a very simple git-based CMS so that the client can update the content themselves. Web dev has really come a long way, des…

Be careful with Netlify. Their bandwidth charges are even more egregious than Vercel’s.

Yes, good point. Although the traffic for these websites is so small, that I think I‘m good there for a long time.
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