First Impression of GatsbyJS - Read Time: 3 Mins
📅 November 25, 2018
•⏱️3 min read
Introduction
When I first heard of GatsbyJS I was like, erm... is it another new front-end framework that I had to learn like React or Vue.
So what caught my eye is that Gatsby is a static site generator built using React and takes advantage of GraphQL to display data.
I will be writing a series on Gatsby and hopefully ending off in contributing to projects using Gatsby like revamped Engineers.sg site.
In the future, I might be considering in converting my WIX website to one due to the affordability of hosting static sites like Netlify.
What is a Static Site Generator?
They are HTML, Javascript and CSS files that pull data from APIs to display content.
They are vastly different from the CMS like Wordpress, Drupal or Squarespace.
Many developers will choose this because of the advantage it gives to use static site generators compared to a conventional CMS.
Here are a few advantages of using static site generators:
- They are lightly fast - websites built using static site generators loads a lot of faster than a CMS.
Whenever a website is called a small amount of code is executed and compiles into HTML, Javascript and CSS files which does not require a lot of processing when a visitor comes to the site.
Compared to WordPress that has a lot of underlying logic and processes before it could even display content.
- Security - Using static site generators offers a lot of security.
it does not requires much patching and maintenance compared to when you're using CMS like Wordpress or Drupal which has abysmal security records.
- Low Barrier of Entry to Contribute - Allows anyone to focus on creating content through markups instead of using the editors in CMS.
Which has a learning curve that does not allow developer specific functions like for example adding code blocks for tutorials you create in a blog post
Conclusion
There are tons of tutorials for creating blogs and hosting it through Netlify which is an affordable way for a developer to create a blog and show off their work to the world.
Besides that, I'm currently going through the tutorial on the GatsbyJS website. I found that the GatsbyJS website offers great documentation that makes it easy to get started with it.
With tons of plugin and themes that make it get started similar to the experience using the create-react-app repo when I'm going through Udacity React Nanodegree.
Links
Static Sites vs CMS
https://developer.okta.com/blog/2018/06/07/static-sites-vs-cms