Thoughts on Astro Dot Build

There are a few paths you can take when dealing with the ever-evolving Javascript world. You could either get disgruntled at all the constantly changing advancements and frameworks, or find one that excites you and toy around with it while it's still in beta. I tend to hold off a little bit now and wait to see how things are adopted and grow before spending a bunch of time on a brand new technology. I think I'm gonna waive that rule and jump in a little early on Astro.

I have been primarily working in both React and Vue since right around their first releases. I tend to go for Next for SSG and SSR usecases, and use Vue for SPA apps. This has turned me into more of a generalist with both, but I don't like forcing a framework into a spot where a better option could be selected. This has left me with a bunch of previously-built feature components in both frameworks to use in future scenarios, and the thing that excites me is being able to use both in Astro!

The other thing that excites me is shipping with no blocking Javascript. I used Eleventy for a few projects a couple years ago. One of them was this site when I moved it off of Wordpress. I really enjoyed the quick build times and lighthouse scores improvements while working with it. The thing I didn't like was taking previously-built React or Vue components and converting them all over to Nunjucks templates. It was much easier with the Vue components, but converting JSX back to HTML is a waste of time in my opinion. I think being able to easily use your components, while maintaining quick, non-blocking load times is definitely the way of the future.

My guess is that with how fast Next comes out with updates, new features, and generally has the best developer experience out right now, they are going to adopt the Astro build with no JS aspect into a future release very soon. Hopefully things keep growing with Astro, the idea of not being tied to one framework is a great idea, and I'm definitely going to keep building some test projects with it as it grows!

Give it a try HERE