alt Hacker News> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.
Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side.
Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?
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It gets worse, some teams would get x real estate on a website, and one team would use React, another Vue, another would use Angular because they owned that real estate on your site and that's what the team was best with. Astro lets you still do that, but turns it all into static content. Think of orgs the size of Google or YouTube, there are different teams responsible for what looks like a small thing but different pieces of a giant pie.
Whenever you think that everything old is new again and we're just retracing our steps from the past, you risk missing the lessons learned in the meantime.
What is the preffered way to do the opposite now? Not every webapp should be architected as an website.
> The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.
This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).
It was and will be.
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand why "islands" isn't just "bits of JavaScript on a static page".
It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
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IMO it's because the web has a huge diversity of behaviors (in a way that, say, native apps do not) but a monoculture on the development side.
React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.
And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.