Why Gatsby?

April 20th, 2020

Being front-end developer nowadays is a lot more complicated then back in early 2010-s.

You'd need to know some basics of HTML, CSS and a little bit of this sidekick of programming languages which goes by the name of JavaScript to animate some stuff on the client side.

Suddenly JS appered to be one of a kind and bunch of frameworks have come into our life - you know, even JQuery was considered as framework back then and man, it was awesome.

As a matter of fact there are a bunch of js frameworks available - AngularJS, NextJS, GatsbyJS - you name it!

So what makes a difference with Gatsby?

First - its simplicity and quickness which it brings on the table.

Gatsby operates within the client side by building virtual DOM structure what allows to change pages with supersonic speed.

Let`s find out and check the framework web-page.

First thing that`d anchor my attention was this motto:

Future-proof your website

Do not build a website with last decade’s tech. The future of the web is mobile, JavaScript and APIs. Every website is a web app and every web app is a website. Gatsby.js is the universal JavaScript framework you’ve been waiting for.

Wow! I’ve been preaching about JAMstack for a while. But nothing new since using API`s is a most common practice in modern developing world.

Bring your own data feature.

Gatsby’s rich data plugin ecosystem lets you build sites with the data you want — from one or many sources: Pull data from headless CMSs, SaaS services, APIs, databases, your file system, and more directly into your pages using GraphQL

Now this is getting more interesting. Here is some quick example:

One third of the hole web-apps population are build on WordPress CMS.

According to name Gatsby is nothing but React.

In other words you have the tool to develop React frontend for your current WordPress site!

All you have to do is install some plugins and get accsess to WP API.

And you know what? Gatsby don't give a sh.... about your content source. It doesn't matter what are ypu gonna use ahiile you can get an API request properly done.

By the way I use Contentful on my portfolio page...

And last but not least reason for me to choose Gatsby - speed.

Gatsby.js builds the fastest possible website. Instead of waiting to generate pages when requested, pre-build pages and lift them into a global cloud of servers — ready to be delivered instantly to your users wherever they are.

As mentioned above - Gatsby is React, plain and simple. Same charachteristics which immanent to React.js are using in Gatsby.