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Jamstacked Issue 88

The Great Gatsby

Published: Sep 7, 2023

Your Jamstack update
 

#​88 — September 7, 2023
✦ web version

There was a lot of hand wringing recently about the future of GatsbyJS triggered by a tweet by Astro founder Fred Schott regarding a lack of recent commits. The reaction seems to shine a light on how important GatsbyJS still is, even if it's past its prime in terms of popularity. Many companies, including large ones, remain committed to maintaining Gatsby projects, which leads me to believe that, despite recent strategy shifts and layoffs, Netlify ultimately will make the necessary resources available to keep the project going in the near term.

Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's Good

The Future of Gatsby Cloud and GatsbyJS
This is the official announcement of the sunsetting of Gatsby Cloud. It’s also notable as it relates to the discussions around the future of GatsbyJS (i.e. the framework not the platform) — the post states that this will free up resources to dedicate to the improvement of Gatsby JS. Zach Leatherman noted on Mastodon that GatsbyJS was down to a single engineer, so (as summarized well in The New Stack) this caused a lot of concern over GatsbyJS's future. Personally, like I mentioned above, with a lot of companies, both large and small still on Gatsby, I predict that it will ultimately get the resources it requires to continue along with the recently announced new Gatsby Adapters functionality.

Mathias Biilmann

Astro 3.0
The latest version of Astro claims to be the first major framework to implement the View Transitions API, making transitions possible without a SPA. It also includes improvements to Image Optimization, Fast Refresh JSX and more. Also Astro was featured by the Chrome team for their use of the View Transitions API.

Astro

Things You Forgot (Or Never Knew) Because of React
A controversial take on React in part because it labels React as “legacy software.” I’ll admit that I am biased (I’ve been a React user but never a fan), but it makes a strong case that many of the underlying principles of React are outdated and that tools like Svelte, Vue, Solid, Fresh and Astro are better options to explore.

Josh Collinsworth

✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...

❖ TIDBITS

Vercel: Our Official Hosting Partner
Astro has also changed their official hosting partner (formerly Netlify) to Vercel, with Vercel sponsoring $5,000/month towards the open-source Astro project. On the Astro side, this includes some new features such as edge middleware support, serverless code splitting and image optimization support.

Astro

Enhance vs. Lit vs. WebC…or, How to Server-Render a Web Component
A detailed but opinionated look at three different tooling options for server rendering web components to choose a “winner.”

Jared White

Fun With Frontmatter: Part 1 - Related Posts
How to add related posts to a page’s frontmatter and then retrieve and display them using Eleventy. Part 2 deals with adding “follow ups” and Part 3 is on handling edits.

Raymond Camden

Vercel's Next Big Thing: AI SDK and Accelerator for Devs
With their Vercel AI SDK and accelerator, Vercel has transitioned heavily into becoming a platform for web apps that are integrating AI, claiming that “building AI apps is the #2 reason folks are signing up to Vercel these days.”

Richard MacManus

Displaying 'Now Playing' Data with Matching Emoji using Netlify Edge Functions and Eleventy
Adding dynamic content into an otherwise static Eleventy page using Netlify functions.

Cory Dransfeldt

Thanks for reading. — Brian