What is Astro?
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- čas přidán 28. 08. 2022
- What is Astro? And by that, I mean several things: what is Astro for? When is it a good idea to use Astro? And when is it not? What problem is it trying to solve? In other words: what is Astro's why… its "raison d'être" as the French would say?
Before we go any further, in order to research Astro and understand how it works, I actually rewrote my personal website with it, at kodaps.dev, using one of the templates Astro provides. Now, what is Astro ?
It might be easier to start by defining what Astro is not.
Astro is a JavaScript framework… but I hesitate to call it that. Why? Because people immediately assume that means a frontend framework. One intended as an alternative to React and the like. Astro is something else. It works with frontend frameworks, in collaboration not in competition with them.
It does not aim to compete with Next.js or Remix either, although those two do address similar use cases.
It's refreshing to hear Astro’s creators state that, no, they don't want to address every single need. And no, there are situations where Astro is not ideal for the job at hand.
Because Astro is … a tool. A tool that targets a particular use case: publishing content-focused websites.
What does that mean? Well, to understand that we'll be going over Astro's features, its strengths, and its weaknesses, such as:
- Astro's old-school page rendering model (and what use cases Astro targets)
- Astro's developer experience or DX
- Astro's "complexity you can opt-in to"
- How Astro goes about creating pages that load fast
- And the "islands of interactivity" model - Věda a technologie
This is really valuable. It’s honestly hard to find content that teaches the “who, what, why, and when” rather than just the “how.”
I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Astro, but with no time to look into it, I didn’t really know what it was for. And now I do, in just 8 minutes. Thanks!
You explain concepts remarkably well! Glad I found your channel, please keep making videos like this!
Thanks for your encouragement and your kind words, it means a lot to me!
I really appreciate the calmness of your voice, the soothing spa background sound, and the well-placed stock animations in your tutorial. It helped me gain a better understanding of what "Release It!" does. By any chance, could you also share a link to your "Release It!" JSON config? Best, Benny
Webdevelopment becomes more interesting. But what really stands out is that people do not want that much JS anymore in the frontend. In the last years we overdid it with the "standard" react way even when it was not needed. It just added complexity where non was required.
NextJS provided frontend devs to get into backend
HTMX provided backend devs to get into frontend, building reactive webpages without touching JS
Astro is basicaly a (feature rich) static site generator with the option for reactive components.
Fantastic presentation.
Calm and meaningful.
Thanks, I’m glad you liked it :)
Great explanations and video editing 👍
This video is so well done, I love it!
Glad you like it, thanks for the kind words :)
should i design my portfolio website with a blog using Vue or Astro?
For what is it worth I would go for Astro (and you can have Vue components within Astro if you need additional interactivity)
great😍
Thanks :)
and if it will be handling SPA that would be a god work
Check out Astro-SPA
Astro" is a prefix that is commonly used to refer to things related to astronomy, which is the scientific study of celestial objects and phenomena in the universe, including stars, planets, galaxies, and other objects.
It is also completely unrelated to the video’s subject matter :)