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by buro9 4166 days ago
I'd love to see how different people solve the highly dynamic plus static problem.

This usually boils down to the shopping cart and checkout example... you can always attack the checkout process as it is a unique, dynamic part of the process that no web store wishes to ever be unavailable.

How does one "go static" with web applications that by necessity involve interactions with datastores?
2 comments
Arcanum-XIII 4166 days ago
The idea is not that everything need to be static - some contents are by nature updated too fast, or too often, to be static. Still, there's lot of page that could be pre generated since the content of the datastore itself is not evolving a lot. Most blog could use a static blog generator for example, with the comment being the only dynamic part - and a lot of cms page too ! Pre baking stuff is so much easier, faster, and cleaner.
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chriswarbo 4166 days ago
True. My personal site is static (generated with Hakyll), and uses Disqus for comments (only because I haven't yet seen a simple, self-hosted alternative which has been battle-tested).
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oneeyedpigeon 4166 days ago
I work on a statically generated site in which the comment form simply feeds back into the generation workflow. It's certainly not 'battle tested', but it has the advantage that a) we get to own the comments rather than giving them to someone else b) everyone can partake in the discussion c) much less demand on the client when rendering
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chriswarbo 4166 days ago
Many dynamic things can be accomplished client-side these days. I see no problem with that, as long as it degrades gracefully to some default fallback.

In other cases, it's probably best to have each stateful system as an isolated component. For example, having a dynamic checkout doesn't require the news section to be dynamic. In fact, if you can isolate components like your checkout, you may be able to have someone else manage it for you. For example, at a previous job we used FoxyCart to deal with online checkouts; we just embedded specially-crafted URLs into our pages (although those pages were still running in Drupal!).

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