Astro is a fresh but familiar approach to building websites. | Opensource Findings
Astro is a fresh but familiar approach to building websites. Astro combines decades of proven performance best practices with the DX improvements of the component-oriented era. Use your favorite JavaScript framework and automatically ship the bare-minimum amount of JavaScript—by default.
Most of the JS based JAMStack solutions you know do let you produce optimized, pre-generated HTML files, but as they're usually based on a UI framework, there's a core JS Framework runtime - React for Gatsby, Vue for Gridsome, Angular for Scully, that always ships! It's part of the core experience and is expected to be always needed. Even if you have pages that might not need any interactivity or behavioral code, the runtime gets downloaded and interpreted. It's a precious time wasted, on a non-essential job, from a static page perspective.
So, why do we prefer a #js based SSG solution in the first place?
- Mostly probably because of one of the following reasons -
- Hand-crafting is hard
- Interactivity is almost always required (or we think it is)
- Familiarity with a UI Framework is a top priority
- A familiar tooling, DX, quick/instant feedback loop go a long way, in making tech X a better choice than tech Y
- A rich ecosystem, CMS integrations(like Gatsby) greatly simplify the content authoring pipeline
- The JS/Non-JS tools you knew are wickedly fast, but only produce static HTML (Eleventy, Hugo, etc.) by default. You manage browser-side behaviour the conventional way.
Wouldn't it be good if you can still build SSG sites, without giving up on many of the above benefits(except the ecosystem probably for now) - interactivity, tooling, familiar UI framework, DX, while being more mindful towards the site, and every page served?. No/Less JS by default, and all the client-side JS, loaded precisely when necessary - with the framework itself exposing constructs to orchestrate the JS load and initialization behavior in a fine-tuned way.
If you like how this sounds, Astro is for you!
https://github.com/snowpackjs/astro
