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Astro: the new frontier of Frontend Frameworks 🪐

Domenico Tenace on January 10, 2024

Overview In the historical period in which we live, the frontend world is saturated with frameworks: Vue, React, Angular, just to name t...

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Alex Lohr • Jan 11

Astro is a great choice when you have a lot of static content. The ability to use different framework's components is also immensely helpful for migrations. However, if neither of those are the case, it is merely overhead.

Domenico Tenace • Jan 11

Absolutely true!
Astro was born to avoid unnecessary JavaScript use.

It's their philosophy!

Nikola Mitic • Jan 17 • Edited

Thank you for the introduction ☺️

Question 🤔 Why is it a frontend framework when the emphasis is on shipping zero JS? (Which I think is great btw)

I'm getting very confused with the naming out there recently.

Frank Dana • Jun 29 • Edited

It's a frontend framework because it's used for building the frontend of a website -- the content that the user sees. A backend framework would be used to build the business logic that drives the frontend.

A web frontend can run on the client (by serving client-side JS that runs the frontend), or on the server (by running server-side code -- which doesn't have to be JS -- that produces and serves a primarily-HTML frontend).

The frontend/backend split is different from the client-side/server-side split. Anything to do with displayed content and the UI is frontend, wherever it runs.

Nikola Mitic • Jun 29

Hm interesting take. For me this still feel like a web framework not frontend. More of a Full stack as where code runs is important. The goal of a a framework is important.

Will have to sit on your comment for a while as you make good points.

Domenico Tenace • Jan 19

Hi!
it was a pleasure!

Regarding your question, I can tell you that although an Astro project in production does not use JavaScript unless necessary, during development this language is present and is part of many constructs!
For this reason it can be considered a frontend framework.

Petipois • Jan 18

I absolutely love Astro. I recently created a YouTube tutorial series called Canva to Astro, converting a canvas template to astro 4. Absolutely great framework.

Thanks for the article

Giuliano1993 • Jan 10

I really like Astro, I haven't tried it yet but I'm planning to use it for building some side-projects page! Still, great article, gives a nice overview of Astro and now really feel even more like build something with it!