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Comment by brianolson | Hacker News Reader

The homepage is all hype, I'm still not sure what Astro really _is_. From clicking through to GitHub I know you install it with npm, so I guess it's written in JavaScript. I guess it's focused on browser side but for 'all in one's I'd expect something server side too?

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It's a static site generator (that can also run SSR sites if you need to update pages fast - e.g. for ecommerce) for conent focused sites + a custom templating language that lets you use UI components from any framework.

  Astro is an all-in-one web framework

  powered by your favorite UI components and libraries

Clear as mud.

Nah not really.

Are you not sure what a framework is? Or are you confused by there being different UI components and libraries?

Either way both are pretty easy to look up!

“all-in-one”

Yes, that is what it says.

all-in-one (new oxford dictionary): "combining two or more items or functions in a single unit"

Astro

- can do SPA

- can do MPA

- can use a variety of different view libraries

- can write endpoints to serve any data

So is your ill-defined issue with "all-in-one" the fact that it doesn't support every single view library?

It's a framework like NextJS. It focuses on static content generation first but allows you to make small parts of the page interactive (JS rendered) instead of making whole pages JS rendered in order to facilitate some interactive widget in the corner (hence the name Islands Architecture).

It also has an ability to mix and match components from different frameworks on the same page/site. I think this is mostly a gimmick though, no one should be pulling in multiple frameworks for a single page or site.

Definitely not a gimmick; it's not that most teams would pull in components from different frameworks, it's that teams can add targeted interactivity using the framework of their choice on one shared templating framework that can run on the server per request or generated once on build.

Astro is really, really neat, IMO and suitable for use cases that are content focused but still require encapsulated areas of interactive components.

What if you have a bunch of code written in one framework and you want to do a gradual migration to another?

it's an implementation of the micro-frontend idea: https://micro-frontends.org

here is the key page: https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/islands

Thank you! I’ve seen Astro referenced and praised many times, gone to the homepage, and clicked around, etc.

That second link is the only one I’ve seen that explains what Astro actually does.

> I guess it's focused on browser side

hmm, doesn't look like so:

> Leverage Astro's unique zero-JS frontend architecture

combined with:

> Deploy anywhere, even to the edge

we could infer it doesn't run anything client side nor server side, so it looks like a neighbour comment would be right, this homepage is all about a fancy way of describing a static site generator?

No, it allows ssr and JavaScript components from any framework

It's a framework for hype driven junior developers. They have the staying power of a mayfly.

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