Astro for Sites

I’ve converted my old Next.js blog to use Astro, which is now powering this very site you’re reading here! And Astro has blown me away with its developer experience for a site like this. Having top level await and the ability to fetch markdown posts so easily is just so nice. It makes using markdown files in a directory “as a database” feel so natural and it’s honestly wonderful DX.

Solid or Svelte for Apps

Channeling @Swyx here: I am convinced my goto now is:

Astro for sites, and Solid/Svelte for Apps.

I’m still taking Solid and Svelte out for some test drives with some bigger, more complex applications, so that’s why I’m hedging a little bit here. I’ve used both for small toy projects, and don’t get me wrong they are both phenomenal. But I haven’t used their respective meta-frameworks sufficiently yet, to find my personal favorite. But for making content sites, I don’t feel any need to look further than Astro. Honestly, using something like Svelte or Solid strikes me as overkill at this point. Perhaps if I need to implement a user login/authentication for this blog would be the only possible reason to change my mind on that (however, I don’t and won’t need user login here). As a side note, here I’m also keeping a close eye on Qwik, since that also looks fascinating. However, I haven’t tried that framework out at all yet, so I can’t say either way there. I’ll probably give Qwik a spin fairly soon on some small toy app I eventually want to play around with.

Sites vs Apps?

What’s the distinction that I’m making between sites and apps here? Well, this is very much an opinion, but I think the main distinction is a need to client side global state management. If there is none, then it’s a site, if there is some, then it’s an app. The key is thinking through the site’s needs and features enough to be able to predict whether you’ll need that or not.

With Astro I can easily pull in solid-js for small demo widgets using MDX within my markdown articles. It was seriously easy, too easy. MDX just worked and I had options with what UI framework I use to power the client side component. I naturally went with SolidJS, which I’m a big fan of for interactive widgets due to it’s fidelilty to the DOM as well as its wonderful reactive primitives, of course!

What Next?

To be honest, I don’t see much point in investing much in React anymore. The DX was best-in-class for its time, but in my opinion its definitely been eclipsed at this point. On top of that, it doesnt’ feel like React is staying as close to web standards as other frameworks. Finally, React has enough bloat and baggage now that it really is a drag on its bundle size and web vitals scores. So, I’m overdue for a change anyways!

I’ll be using Astro for another content blog site for another business shortly. As for SolidJS, I’m spinning up a data visualization component library with SolidJS and storybook, and also working on a cooldown based RTS game with SolidJS as well, which I’m eager to begin. And for my more interactive LMS (learning management system) site I’ll be using SvelteKit to give that a serious try. Looking forward to both!