It’s been a while since we’ve been excited about a technology product. In the web devolpment world, I believe it was Gatsby.js back in the days. Although more recently, Drupal 11 deserves an honorable mention in that category.
“Astro is fast.” True. “Astro is fun”. Okay, well, it offers a lot of flexibility. There are a lot of bells and whistles. It comes with a build-in point-and-click analysis and audit tool. Yeah, fun!
We just wanted to roll out a small website quickly. With a sane technology, good SEO and easy to edit. Then we fell in love.
Okay, what is Astro really?
“Astro is a JavaScript web framework optimized for building fast, content-driven websites.” - Astro Website
What do I need to learn? Not much, we can use our favourite frameworks, as Astro integrates with UI frameworks like:
- React: Framework with a massive ecosystem, you probably have heard of it
- Vue: Features efficient reactive dependency tracking
- Preact: 3kb lightweight, high-performance React alternative
- Svelte: Compiler-based framework that eliminates the Virtual DOM
Pretty neat.
Anything else, what are the Astro’s Features?
For instance, Astro uses the Islands Architecture. Think of it as small JavaScript islands in your static HTML, only when needed - hydrated separately from the rest of the page.
One of our team’s favourites: Optimized Images with modern image formats by default.
Seamless View Transitions, the Dev Toolbar and much more.
Did we mention that it is Open Source? We almost forgot to tell.
(One of) Astro Future(s)
Someone else also noticed that Astro is pretty cool and built a WordPress replacement with it.
When that someone is as big as Cloudflare, it could become interesting.
Currently EmDash, as Cloudflare named the project, is at an early stage. We are interested to see what will become of it. For now, Astro is already great as it is and we will continue to enjoy using it where suitable.