Write some straight HTML pages and serve it from bog standard Apache. Heck, get really fancy and do some server-side includes for your CSS or something.
It's really fast, you can edit it with Notepad, and you can probably saturate your bandwidth with a consumer level PC.
It's fluff because, well, our expectations are so unbelievably low. By the time you've bolted on every whizbang dingus leveraging four different languages (two of which are some flavor of Javascript), your twelve page site takes a couple of minutes to compile (what?), and it chokes your three load-balanced AWS compute nodes.
Web applications are hard. I get that. Web sites? They were, by design, incredibly simple. We make them complicated for often unclear reasons.
I appreciate what the Astro folks are trying to do, and it's very clever. But your basic Web site need not require freaking npm in order to "return to the fundamentals of the Web".
Astro will generate those HTML pages you can serve 'from bog standard Apache'.
You can then use all of those npm packages to do whatever processing on your data that you want to do to generate the content and the pages and then just serve it as HTML.
I'm a backend dev, but Astro is the first time a front end framework has made sense to me for years. It fits my mental model of how the web works - serving up HTML pages with some JS just like we did 20 years ago. Its just that I can have it connect to a DB or an API to pull the data at build time so that I can have it generate all of the pages.
But astro literally generates straight html which can be cached wherever you want...
As for build time, I don't have a clue - I haven't used astro (and don't plan to. Datastar + whatever backend framework you want is better). But I'm generally in favour of the direction they're bringing JS frameworks.
It's really fast, you can edit it with Notepad, and you can probably saturate your bandwidth with a consumer level PC.
It's fluff because, well, our expectations are so unbelievably low. By the time you've bolted on every whizbang dingus leveraging four different languages (two of which are some flavor of Javascript), your twelve page site takes a couple of minutes to compile (what?), and it chokes your three load-balanced AWS compute nodes.
Web applications are hard. I get that. Web sites? They were, by design, incredibly simple. We make them complicated for often unclear reasons.
I appreciate what the Astro folks are trying to do, and it's very clever. But your basic Web site need not require freaking npm in order to "return to the fundamentals of the Web".