Astro is gaining a lot of steam as a web framework, especially with their new 2.0 annoucement.
Read the Astro 2.0 announcement here.
Astro highlights a few things at a high level.
- Performance
- Content-focus
So far
Leading up to now, we’ve needed solutions that solve for the following, really well.
- Blogging
- Code showcase
- Dev Docs
- Design System docs
- Markdown and Code combination
Basically, all the features for personal digital gardens, and enterprise dev docs and design systems.
What have the options been so far?
- SSG with Markdown
- Next with Markdown
- Next with MDX
- Next with Markdoc
- Create React App CRA? Phew. Feeling sweaty already.
All the Next options have been viable and served well.
The Astro game-changer
Island Architecture
Bringing your own framework, new take of progressive enhancement, SSR and speed lead to awesome possibilities and better UX.
Content from anywhere
Ability to pull content from anywhere like Markdown, MDX, API or CMS with SSR and SSG support makes it a complete offering.
BYOComponentFramework
Lots of modern front-end framework integration opportunities.
Ecosystem and deployment options seem encouraging as well.
Other notables
- Content Collections API and typesafety make it powerful to use for anything from blog to dev docs
- Hybrid rendering in mixing SSR and SSG
- DX on error paneling and communication
- Improved dev server HMR
- Vite improvements
The open roadmap seems to make it more easy to follow and builds trust.
I am planning to use it for work to see how we can use Astro for design system docs portal bringing together various technologies, building an intuitive Authoring eXperience AX. Also, for comms methods in blogs, newsletter etc.
This website is built in Astro as well, at the time of writing this post!