Simon describes the pattern he uses for content sites to get all of the resilience of static site generators while keeping dynamic functionality.
Sensible advice from Chris:
So what’s the best rendering method? Whatever works best for you, but perhaps a hierarchy like this makes some general sense:
- Static HTML as much as you can
- Edge functions over static HTML so you can do whatever dynamic things
- Server generated HTML what you have to after that
- Client-side render only what you absolutely have to
The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?
We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.
This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.
It me:
Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.
This rings sadly true to me:
Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.
Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:
Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.
Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).
I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.
I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.