#QuickCuppa - Thoughts on GatsbyJS, the React-based SSG framework

UI Therapy | UI Design and Development Podcast

UIT 5: In this week's episode I share my thoughts on the use of GatsbyJS and whether I feel it's a viable static site generator framework.

What are static sites?
Static sites have been around for a very long time, and realistically are the original website: simply HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They are not rendered during runtime; there is no server-side code, no database, etc.

What’s a static site generator?
It’s a tool that generates static sites whenever you decide to run a build on your code base.

Contrast this to typical javascript frameworks and libraries, these usually generate HTML content on the client side during runtime.
How is this different from server-side rendering? The primary difference is that there is no server-side code. So, unlike a framework such as Django, Gatsby does not render anything on the server when a request is made. Everything is generated at the build time of the application.
A few benefits of a static site are: speed, the simplest infrastructure, search engine optimization, and security.

GatsbyJS
“Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps”

  • Built on top of ReactJS
  • GraphQL for data
  • Uses any source for content; I use MDX (JSX in Markdown)

Pros

  • Love React, writing components is a joy.
  • Because it’s built on ReactJS has access to a huge ecosystem of packages.
  • ...

Full show notes available at https://uitherapy.fm/episodes/5/

Links

  • Free Stickers: https://uitherapy.fm/journal/free-stickers/ 
  • GatsbyJS: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ 
  • GraphQL: https://graphql.org/ 
  • Static web page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page 
  • JSX: https://reactjs.org/docs/introducing-jsx.html
  • MDX: https://mdxjs.com/
  • hopking.io: https://hopking.io/
  • Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/ 
  • Wagtail CMS: https://wagtail.io/ 
  • Django-graphene: https://docs.graphene-python.org/projects/django/en/latest/ 

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