💥 Introduction
🏞 New frontiers of business and technology emerge during times of major paradigm shifts. The way we view a changing world will determine our outcomes, both individually and collectively. In this post, we will compare static-site-generators, or SSGs, being used in an un-static world– The optimal outcome: you decide which static-site generator to use or gain a better understanding about how static site generators work.
SSGs can solve a variety of web development problems, including startup landing page’s, blogs, FAQ pages, or documentation sites. The sky is the limit when it comes to what you can dream up, so get to building a Static website in Q4-22- 2023 and set yourself and your family up for success.
⚙️ Table-Of-Contents
📑 Keywords
Web Development; Static Site Generators; Jekyll; Hugo; Gatsby; VuePress
🌍 📊 Building For The Future In An Uncertain World
As 2022 comes to a close, the world remains in a period of convalescence after the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s difficult to predict how the months ahead will unfold. As new regimes vie for power and new movements oppose them, geopolitical and socioeconomic forces will continue to shift. Winston Church Hill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”, for it is during times of crisis that the greatest business opportunities arise. How we choose to react to the impending challenges will determine the outcome of our lives and our organizations.
What can we do to make ourselves more antifragile in the future? To solve real-world problems, we learn, build, and use our collective-creative might. Regardless of world events, it’s more important than ever to plan for the future and acquire new skills for your career or to launch your next blog or startup.In the same way that web development evolves, so do the tools and technologies developers use to build websites and web applications. For a variety of reasons, static site generators have gained popularity in recent years. Now let’s take a look at some of the advantages of SSGs before reviewing some of the most popular SSGs available.
🖥️ The History of Static-site-generators (SSGs)
SSGs have been around since 2008 with the launch of Jekyll In response to the widespread adoption of CMS-based applications like WordPress, which have been popularized by bloggers and digital-news companies alike but loathed by web developers due to their inflexibility. At the time, Jekyll was created to solve a very specific developer pain point. Build a blog-aware static site that allows developers to maintain content and code simultaneously and within their text editor of choice.
🛠 The Advantages Of Static-Site-Generators (SSGs)
✴️ Static site generators can improve the speed and simplicity of your development process. Traditionally, dynamic websites require the installation of a server, CMS, database, and other infrastructure before the front end can be developed, or the front end and back end can be developed independently which requires a lot more coordination and resources.
✴️ You only need a text editor and a web server to get started with most static site generators. Additionally, static site generators can help your website be more secure. The lack of a database or server-side code reduces the chances of vulnerabilities being exploited by hackers. Furthermore, static site generators can increase the scalability of your website. If you need to add more features or pages to your website, you can simply generate new files and import them into your text editor. Neither your server nor your database needs to be reconfigured.
✴️ Instead of having users request content from a database for each request, these frameworks generate all content at build time. Recently, and with the introduction of the API-based, JAMstack, and headless architecture adoption, SSGs can provide a unique method of keeping your front-end code separate from your back-end code, thus minimizing potential security risks and simplifying code maintenance.
✴️ Developers benefit from static site generators in a number of ways. If you want to build websites more quickly, more easily, and more securely, the static site generator may be the right tool for you. All qualities that are desired in an ever-changing business climate are built around uncertainty. From a technical perspective, there are some major benefits to using static site generators including more easily optimized SEO, security, load times, and maintainability. In this post, we will take a less technical approach and focus on what tools are available that you can start using today for your next project or problem space if you find that they suit your needs.
🎆 Jekyll - The Pure-Ruby (SSG)
One of the most popular static site generators is Jekyll. The platform was created by Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of GitHub, and is used by GitHub Pages to serve websites for users and organizations. Jekyll is an open-source project written in Ruby. Users enjoy Jekyll due to its simplicity, its large community,avaiable themes, plugins, and ease with which it can be scaled.
⚙️ Building With Jekyll In 2022 - 2023
Currently, Jekyll lacks support within its ecosystem, which is one of its drawbacks. It is still maintained by a core group of contributors, but unless more resources are allocated for its maintenance, Jekyll’s future is uncertain.
In a recent post on Linkedin, Ruby on Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson launched The Rails Foundation. Its mission:
“To improve the documentation, education, marketing, and events in our ecosystem to the benefit of all new and existing Rails developers. It’s been started by some of the most important companies involved with Rails, and will work to ensure a prosperous ecosystem that continues to improve, and becomes even more attractive to newcomers going forward.” ~ David Heinemeier Hansson - Founder of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp
The Rails Foundation aims to revive the Rails community by retaining developers and re-acquiring those who have abandoned RoR in recent years. The combination of Hotwire: HTML Over-The-Wire and the Rails-Javascript framework Stimulus will be a major benefit for the tech and developer communities with this future bet on RoR (Ruby on Rails). In the hope that Jekyll’s popularity and adoption will increase due to the increasing demand for ruby and rails-based tools, it is hoped that interest and adoption will rise.
🎇 Hugo (SSG)
Hugo is one of the newer SSGs that has quickly become a favorite among developers. Hugo is an open-source project written in Go, a programming language known best for its speed. With Hugo, you can expect immensely fast build times, increased revenue as a result of increased load times, easily optimized SEO, and customize your website hastily, easily, and with a wide range of themes and plugins, all devoid of a database, your text editor handles all of your data. One of the core use cases for Hugo has been marketing sites and Blogs, but the application of this framework expands well beyond those two buckets.
🌌 Gatsby (SSG)
As the world of web development shifts towards headless, Gatsby.JS offers a unique tool for creating static sites - Gatsby is a React-based Javascript framework designed for headless and JAMstack web architecture, web applications, and sites of varying complexity, size, and scope.
For developers familiar with ReactJS, Gatsby should be relatively straightforward to get up to speed with. It combines ReactJS, GraphQL, and Webpack into one framework, with an innovative data layer to integrate into your headless CMS of choice. Gatsby.js adoption has waned recently, but it remains a powerful tool for companies with business requirements that align with the framework’s design.
🎑 VuePress (SSG)
Developed by Evan You, who also developed Vue.js, VuePress is a static site generator (SSG). Vue.js and VuePress are both lightweight, fast, and easy to use. Vue.Js is a front-end framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications based on the model-view-view model architecture. In VueJS, the view layer is the focus.
Since VueJs uses HTML for rendering rather than JavaScript, developers unfamiliar with JavaScript generally find it easier to get started with VueJs. With this SSG, your HTML is pre-rendered as static HTML for each page, then rendered as a SPA (single-page application) once it loads. VuePress’ core use case is similar to the other SSGs we have reviewed thus far, including landing pages, blogs, and documentation pages.
🌍 🛫 The future of Static-Site Generators (SSGs) - Conclusion
Not to be redundant, but I would like to reaffirm a point - There is no better time to begin reviewing new frameworks, taking that course you have been wanting to take, or begin to perform research to validate a business case for your next project or startups, than during times of uncertainty.Rather than focusing too much of our energy on the negative, why not view the negative as an opportunity?
It’s difficult to predict what the future holds for static-site generators as the web development world continues to evolve. However, given the advantages that they offer, it’s likely that static site generators (SSG) will continue to be popular among developers due to the push toward API-first, headless, and JAMstack architectures. If you’re looking for a fast, simple, and secure way to build websites, a static site generator may be the right tool for you, the use cases and potential applications are rather extensive– In addition to the SSGs discussed in this post, there are other options for you to select from, including Eleventy, Docusorous, and Next. JS.
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