Was talking with one of my ex-business partner today. We made clear choices for our website/blog / documentation/landing pages etc on this venture to work with an external agency specialized in “JAM STACK” static website. We made this choice mainly for security / low maintenance / modern web-based on API and incredible speed.
We were talking about wappler and he asked me if on the static side of the product they are plan to make it a static website generator like Hugo or Gatsby. Is it a topic already discussed here? A topic discussed at the team level?
A low code tool providing static/serverless sites would be a real gamechanger (Hugo and gatsby are not for non-dev at all).
Take Hugo as an example. Hugo is a static site generator. The content is written in markdown and the Hugo server generates HTML pages from the markdown. If the remote server has Hugo installed, then the site can be uploaded as is, alternatively the site can be converted to HTML locally and uploaded to be served by Apache and or NGINX. The main advantage is that you do not need a local Lamp/Wamp/Mamp stack.
Contrast this to Wappler where you also do not need Lamp/Wamp/Mamp. Static HTML pages are created without the need for generation. The great advantage here is that you have a choice of server models if you desire. Using Docker for local development, the site can be uploaded as a container or as a conventional site. My personal preference goes out to NodeJS/Express/SQLite. Incidentally, Gatsby also requires NodeJS to be installed locally in order to generate HTML.
Please do not get me wrong, I am not trying to be negative, just realistic.
I got your point.
But from An operation / non dev perspective : avoiding database and the speed are great things.
Hugo can be used with external headless cms. No need to use markdown files. Outside of the dev nobody is touching Hugo. People writing content are using cms tools.
When it comes to servers it’s more easy to manage than anything else. It’s total plug and play with solutions like netlify or vercel.
I strongly believe that jamestack / server less static will be the new norm for blogs / static sites / documentation / landing page. Of course it’s not something that is suitable for applications. The fact that you don’t need to manage server / ci/cd / database and benefit for an unbeatable speed is a real luxury imho.
Well I think for some sites, static generators might really be useful.
Indeed you have like a dynamic sites but it is generated to static on deploy time and uploaded to one of the many static file hostings like netlify, vercel cloudflare or Google Firebase hosting.
Do note that the site is template based and still connected to data source and pages for the changes data are generated.
Advantages are super fast site, great SEO and you can still also use App Connect client side data bindings if you wish.
Well it is pretty easy from technical point of view - I see the static generation just as any other build step.
So like maybe you want to minify before publish, so you can have static generation before publish.
That said we don’t also have yet added support for packaging on deploy. As till now people were pretty happy with deploying the files as they were.
But minified and packed deployment did made sense when also webpack was hot… It offers some advantages in speed.
But recently the browser are getting more smart and partial loading/prefetch gains more speed than packing everything in one big file.
And the complexity of webpack becomes more obvious and unneeded.
So will see how it all goes.
But that said a build pipeline during project deployment is a good way to go. But that is another topic
