Cloudflare Acquires Team Behind Open Source Framework Astro (thenewstack.io) 9
Cloudflare has acquired the core team behind the open source JavaScript framework Astro, bringing its creators in-house while pledging to keep Astro fully open source. The New Stack reports: Astro is used by major brands like IKEA, Unilever, Visa and OpenAI to build fast, content-driven websites. Search engines prioritize fast-loading and clean pages, the Cloudflare statement noted. Websites that rely heavily on JavaScript for initial rendering often struggle to deliver the required speed, which hinders search rankings and customer conversions.
Pages on Astro serve up only the code needed to display a page in a browser. That's in part because of its Island architecture, which it introduced in 2021. Astro's Islands allow developers to create "islands" of interactive client-side components, while most of the page is generated statically in HTML. Server Islands extend the same architecture to the server.
Astro is also UI-agnostic, meaning that while it has its own independent engine, it allows developers to bring in components from React, Svelte, Vue and other frameworks. This makes Astro a preferred choice for building high-performance, content-driven websites optimized for speed, according to Cloudflare. "Over the past few years, we've seen an incredibly diverse range of developers and companies use Astro to build for the web," said Astro's former CTO, Fred Schott, in a post with Cloudflare senior product manager Brendan Irvine-Broque. "At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too -- for our developer docs, website, landing pages and more." They said that the acquisition will allow them to "double down" on making Astro the best framework for content-driven websites.
Pages on Astro serve up only the code needed to display a page in a browser. That's in part because of its Island architecture, which it introduced in 2021. Astro's Islands allow developers to create "islands" of interactive client-side components, while most of the page is generated statically in HTML. Server Islands extend the same architecture to the server.
Astro is also UI-agnostic, meaning that while it has its own independent engine, it allows developers to bring in components from React, Svelte, Vue and other frameworks. This makes Astro a preferred choice for building high-performance, content-driven websites optimized for speed, according to Cloudflare. "Over the past few years, we've seen an incredibly diverse range of developers and companies use Astro to build for the web," said Astro's former CTO, Fred Schott, in a post with Cloudflare senior product manager Brendan Irvine-Broque. "At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too -- for our developer docs, website, landing pages and more." They said that the acquisition will allow them to "double down" on making Astro the best framework for content-driven websites.
Everyone wants one (Score:2)
Seems that all the web frameworks are being swallowed up by corporations now:
Guess "open-source is not a business model" was true after all.
Re: (Score:3)
It isn't like this is something new, people with connections getting a lot of cash and buying up talent with the business plan of "their users will be our customers" has been a thing since the NCSA Mosaic was renamed to Netscape.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't Javascript the opposite of fast loading? (Score:2)
I mean I've seen pages that use no Javascript and just "static pages" and I've seen pages using Javascript. I'm sure much of it is correlation, but plain pages tend to load "much" faster than those using Javascript.
Even those that use Javascript load the faster the fewer libraries and frameworks they load.
Re: (Score:2)
Astro is (largely) a static site generator.
You have a collection of pages in your source tree - e.g. a bunch of files in Markdown format.
Then, when you make a change to the content, Astro ingests all of this, grinds it up and spits out a bunch of static html and css. You can still use JavaScript for interactivity with elements on the page (e.g. an accordion or a slider), but unlike something like WordPress which has all the content in a database and generates each page on-the-fly, all content in Astro is st
Acquires? Hires! (Score:2)
Unless slavery has had a comeback.
Island Architecture? (Score:2)
Can anyone explain this "new" Island Architecture to me? I don't really understand the concept as explained being new.
I'm not a web developer, but I feel that snippets of JavaScript in the midst of static HTML pages is exactly how JavaScript in web pages has been done since the inception of JavaScript. A static HTML page, and a snippet of code to display a bouncing button, for example.
What am I missing? What makes this a new 2019 architecture worthy of a name?
Re: (Score:2)
You can use Islands for a comments section on a blog where the main post page itself is statically generated just once, but then the comments section is dynamically generated each time, or to have your user avatar and logged-in status in the header of an otherwise static page.