[GrahamL]

It's interesting their blog post doesn't mention some of the benefits. Neither does the doc page you linked—at least it doesn't do it succinctly.

Essentially Astro lets you build sites using a JS framework like React or Vue without requiring that framework to be loaded on the frontend. By default, components are just HTML content. Super nice for building very fast static sites using a technology you may already be fluent in.

You can still add interactivity to components if you'd like—just tag components that require interactivity and Astro will bundle the requisite JS for the client.

[tannhaeuser]

Not getting it tbh. Why would you go nuclear and develop a React or Vue app and then not actually use it on the browser side? For content-oriented websites there are much simpler workflows based on SGML and other classic markup processing and content management practices. I mean the point of "content-oriented" and web sites in general really is that an expert in the field, rather than a web developer, can achieve useful results as an author.

[manigandham]

Component-based UI frameworks and ecosystem has made building frontends much nicer, especially when you need some optional interactivity since you're already writing in JS.

Having that productivity and flexibility without the SPA complexity and other JS cruft has real value.

[whostolemyhat]

In that case, it'd be interesting to see the benefits of Astro vs something like Gatsby

[lf-non]

Frameworks like Gatsby didnt have any special support for interactive islands. You can choose to have:

a. A completely static site with no frontend javascript and no client side hydration, or

b. client hydration in which case all the components needed in the page will need to be loaded in the client.

If you want something in between, ie. only some sections need to be interactive, it requires jumping through some hoops eg. creating separate webpack entrypoints that call ReactDOM.render for specific DOM nodes. It is doable but more work and maintenance effort.

Astro simplifies handling for these kind of islands by using a server side templating language that is component aware and familiar to users already writing jsx.

[cercatrova]

Developer experience writing React is much nicer than using other markup languages. That's why I use it at least, the fact that it spits out a fully JS-free website at the end is the icing on the top.

[tshaddox]

Nothing about the developer experience of React seems better than any old HTML template language (and hardly better even than plain HTML), if you're not doing any interactivity and are just going to render once and spit out the HTML.

[cercatrova]

Have you used React before? It's miles above HTML templating. I honestly don't use frameworks that have regular templating anymore, like Vue or Svelte.

[tshaddox]

I have used React. I'm a huge fan and I also prefer it over its most common "competitors" like Vue and Svelte.

But React (like Vue and Svelte) are fundamentally about interactivity. If I had a project where I knew for sure that I only wanted to generate HTML sans JS on the server (or with a static build process) I wouldn't even consider using React.

It barely even makes sense. Your "React components" would just be JavaScript functions that take props and return some JSX. None of the interesting React features and hooks would even make sense, other than maybe context (and presumably most or all popular static HTML templating tools have comparable features).

[munbun]

JSX is much easier to maintain than pretty much every other templating language.

If you are building a growing design system with any degree of complexity, React is one of the best tools available.

[dsego]

Which looks nicer? Eta vs JSX

   <%~ includeFile('./navbar', { pages: [
     'home',
     'about',
     'users'
   ] }) %>

   <navbar pages={['home', 'about', 'users']} />

> would just be JavaScript functions that take props and return some JSX

They can also be async functions that process data independently. Whereas templates are commonly just passed in data from the controller.

https://github.com/dsego/ssr-playground/#jsx-partials

[acdha]

Yes. JSX is nice for escaping by default but encourages total spaghetti coding hiding app logic in the templates and various footguns like non-standard attributes className and breaking id. Running it on the server side mitigates the React performance hit somewhat but the selling point is interactivity.

[alanwreath]

What are you referring to? I am unaware of what “regular” templating you’re referring to or what react is achieving that is not available or cumbersome under react or svelte.

I mean if JSX is considered as something particularly powerful (not saying it does) doesn’t Vue actually do that https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/render-function.html ?

[zdragnar]

Think of JSX as a macro, rather than "regular" templating, which is typically string substitution.

For static sites, this means that you get functions and objects the entire way through the render pipeline right up until there is a full tree built and the final output is rendered.

You still get all the separation powers of contexts, the component based reusability, etc, and it is all regular JavaScript / typescript except for the JSX macro itself and React's APIs (which are just JavaScript). Conversely, with templating engines like handlebars / erb / et al you need to learn the specific DSL of the template engine- custom loops and controls, imports for partials, and your custom helpers are limited to what they can do. Even Vue's render function has special markup for control (v-if, v-else).

[nsonha]

> Nothing about the developer experience of React seems better than any old HTML template language

Is that a joke? You get autocomplete from typescript and props to be fully typed functions, or any kind of object for that matter. That compares to autocomplete that's just some ad-hoc, bug ridden tools that locks you into some IDE or editor, and who cares because all the attributes have the same type (string) anyway.

[bryanrasmussen]

and what's your experience writing other markup languages that you base this statement on? I can definitely agree it is nicer for a data intensive sites, and with effort can be made somewhat equivalent in most document heavy sites, but there are definitely some scenarios I've encountered where the match of technology to use case was disastrously not in React's favor.

Specifically I can think of parts of the websites' functionality is editing highly technical structured data documents by highly trained domain experts.

I mean basically where years of developer productivity was thrown down a React hole when it could have been months in SGML / XML based tooling for what was required.

I can say that because I have built big solutions in both stacks, though.

[cercatrova]

I've used many, Handlebars, Pug, Vue's, Svelte's, Zola's, many. They're all somewhat similar in that they try to recreate loops and conditionals, all without strong type support unlike in JSX. I've never used SGML though, another commenter told me that it is more powerful.

[cutler]

You have to be joking, surely? React/Vue as a mere static template languages? Dedicated static site frameworks such as Jekyll and Middleman are a much better experience. My favourite is still Perl's Template::Toolkit.

[cercatrova]

TypeScript, that's the differentiator. Having fully typed variables in the templates cannot be replicated in templating languages (well technically they might be able to but that's not as ergonomic as fact).

[cutler]

Talk about sledgehammer to crack a nut - honestly, why does anyone need type safety in a simple templating operation? Dynamic languages have their uses, you know. Type safety is a tool, not an ideology.

[Yiin]

because it's nice to know whether that `post` variable contains a property `createdAt` or `published` At without leaving the template. Arguing "I don't use it why should you" is unproductive.

[cercatrova]

I basically never use dynamic languages anymore. If there aren't algebraic data types in a language I simply don't use it. Sometimes people think I'm exaggerating but it's truly great to use a language with ADTs that you get spoiled.

[wpietri]

For sure. I'm a big fan of type safety in larger codebases with reasonably stable domains. But when a project's small or new enough to be relatively volatile, the overhead just isn't worth it for me.

[tannhaeuser]

There are "templating languages" such as SGML for generating type-checked markup ie. respecting the regular content model and lexical types expressed in DTDs and other markup declarations. This results in injection-free, HTML-aware templating ie. templating engines can properly quote/escape content in attributes, CDATA sections, etc. and can enforce content model rules (that eg lists consist of nothing but list items, that script elements aren't placed where forbidden as would be required in user content such as comments provided by your web site visitors, etc.) Much more powerful than programming language types, and needed in CMSs.

[chasingtheflow]

You get the speed of SSR but can sprinkle interactivity into the app using the same SPA style frameworks via isolated “islands”.

[4m1rk]

I suppose it's just a different templating engine (plus some optional features for the client side). Probably as a front-end developer people are more familiar with that compared to Jinja for example? Though I think if the target is static web sites then it's simply overkill.

[jen729w]

It might be all you know.

I'm not a web dev by trade but I have a website for a hobby project. I had taught myself React thinking I might make an app. (I never did.)

So now I want to maintain this thing on the side with not much effort using what I already know. And that keeps those skills fresh, which is great.

I'm very interested in Astro.

[reilly3000]

Their homepage https://astro.build has a nice summary of its approach and benefits.

[Existenceblinks]

> using a technology you may already be fluent in.

I think this is the only selling point, given the "content-focused". It's not different than just writing HTML and vanilla js for some interactivity.

[ksec]

So they have moved all the previously frontend stuff to backend and output Hot-wired / Liveview / Livewire instead?

[mwcampbell]

I wish. AFAIK it's just classic server-side rendering with full-page navigation. Mind you, that's the optimal solution in many cases. But a full-stack JavaScript web framework with something like Phoenix's channels and LiveView built in would be a killer combination.

[quechimba]

I just started working on something like this. It's a VDOM implemented in Ruby and it streams updates to the browser via Server-Sent Events which are then applied by a tiny bit of JavaScript.

A basic counter component would look something like this:

    initial_state do |props|
      { count: 0 }
    end

    handler(:increment) do |e|
      update do |count:|
        { count: count + 1 }
      end
    end

    render do
      <div>
        <p>Count: {state[:count]}</p>
        <button on-click={handler(:increment)}>Increment</button>
      </div>
    end

There are some things I'm used to in the JavaScript world that I'm trying to introduce here. I got hot reloading which is pretty cool. And CSS modules... and static typing with Sorbet.

Events are handled on the server, so there's no need for an API... You could just talk to your database directly in your onsubmit-handler. I think that might be the largest benefit from using something like this.

If the app is deployed in a region close to you, you won't barely notice the latency.

[cercatrova]

Isn't that what Hotwire and StimulusJS is?

[floodfx]

Check out https://liveviewjs.com