Netlify is partnering with Astro

Love won. Matt Biilmann, Netlify’s co-founder and CEO, recently announced their new partnership with Astro, ensuring more collaboration, features, and an even better developer experience. Although several new core primitives from both Netlify and Astro will be announced soon, there is no doubt that further development of such a phenomenal open-source framework will make the whole web ecosystem stronger.

Rightly, Biilmann highlighted Astro’s flexibility as one of its most valuable sides: Astro leans in on the web platform, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but does not prescribe any specific component system or UI framework for its interactive islands - widgets floating in a sea of otherwise static, lightweight, server-rendered HTML. React? Vue? Svelte? Lit? Mix and match libraries? Everything is possible, and that elevates Astro as an exceptional framework for content-driven sites (with any level of interactivity), making it easy to build incredibly performant sites.

As we already knew, Netlify actively supported Astro’s work to bring Server Islands later this year. This fact ultimately results in the endless possibilities of websites that load instantly with static “page shells” served from our global CDN, and dynamic islands loaded separately. We’ll see how this collaboration evolves, but joining forces to guarantee that Netlify users have a great experience with Server Islands as Astro moves towards a public, non-experimental launch sounds like love indeed won this time.

Astro has long been one of my own favorite web frameworks and I’ve built countless PoC’s, demos, experiments, and examples with it. Last year we shared that Astro was the leader in framework growth and satisfaction according to the results of our 2023 State of Web Development report. At a time when the most popular Jamstack frameworks evolved from simpler origins to very complex systems, with countless rendering modes, complex JavaScript hydration models, complicated caching modes, and a stronger and stronger sense of vendor lock-in, Astro has been a breath of fresh air with its focus on simplicity and content-driven websites. At Netlify we’re excited to partner with the Astro team to help developers create and unlock the power of the web.

Astro, Databases & the Mirage of WordPress

Astro is conceptually simple - and that’s probably why we love it. Besides an incredible Markdown integration that simply works or its “Content Collections” (a way to manage local content with built-in type safety), there’s a charm in stopping ourselves from overusing JavaScript as much as we do these days, too. But that’s just a part of what makes it so great; some of us want our tools to be flexible, simple to use, and stable, yet growing as much as we do. Whenever it comes to such essential ingredients, it’s clear that Astro always got us covered.

Recently, Astro DB decided to join the match: designed for Astro sites, this database aims to replicate the content management experience of one of a Titan - WordPress. When it comes to the latter, if its everlasting shadow is still present these days, it’s clear that one of its popularity’s biggest drivers, its built-in database, played a crucial role in it. “All content is data”, and WordPress interiorized this concept so well that it gave users a simple way to manage all their content, plugins, or blocks in the same place. Now, what would happen if we were to witness the conjunction of an outstanding framework for content-driven websites combined with the power of a libSQL database, which happens to be a fork of the solidified SQLite?

According to Astro’s co-creator, “libSQL allowed us to rethink the product in a way that makes the database a core part of the experience that is always there”. What we got as a result is a fast, fully managed SQL database designed exclusively for Astro sites, which offers automatic configuration upon server startup, scales based on demand with a free tier, and allows for the quick creation of databases for Astro projects. As for the creative process itself and the implications of working (or not) with SQLite, the article named “Astro chooses Turso to power Astro DB” by Glauber Costa exposed some significant insights on the matter:

Astro excels at content. But at the end of the day, content is just another name for data. (…) Traditionally, creating databases has been an expensive operation. Furthermore, requiring users to set up databases locally to develop with Astro would be a level of friction developers would be unlikely to accept. The Astro team reached for SQLite for its characteristics: each database is just a file, so creating a database per data source is doable. It can also be integrated deeply into the application, since it is just a library and is always on. But SQLite by itself doesn’t solve all problems. While the approach of just shipping SQLite files works well for immutable data, you still need to handle cases where data can be written to, keeping the SQLite files in sync. For production, there is also the need to build infrastructure to handle disaster recovery, replication, and many other things. While the Astro team initially experimented with Cloudflare D1, Turso fit the bill the best. With Turso, Astro was able to use the same libSQL drivers to provide local read only experiences as well as remote databases to the tune of one per project, and in the browser for Stackblitz-based examples, with the libSQL wasm build.

Jakob's Law & the Valley of Cognition

Understanding the level of simplicity and usability in web design is crucial for developers and designers. When we talk about usability, for instance, we’re referring to how users experience and interact with a product; closely related to this, Jakob Nielsen, a renowned expert in the matter, highlighted that users rely on their previous experiences when interacting with new tools, which translates into the irrefutable importance of following common design practices in order to match such expectations and needs. Although it’s undeniable that deviating from these practices could add value to certain products, it is also crucial to understand how mental models work, as users prefer sites that function similarly to what they already know. The reason is simple: this fact implies a significant reduction of cognitive load.

Cleverly and not without an immense impact, Jon Yablonski explained the significance of understanding human psychology in design in his insightful project, Laws of UX:

As humans, we have an underlying “blueprint” for how we perceive and process the world around us, and the study of psychology helps us decipher this blueprint. Designers can use this knowledge to build more intuitive, human-centered products and experiences. Instead of forcing users to adapt to the design of a product or experience, we can use some key principles from psychology as a guide for designing in a way that is adapted to people. (…) Whether it’s a website or a car, we form models of how a system works, and then we apply that model to new situations where the system is similar. In other words, we use knowledge we already have from past experiences when interacting with something new. Mental models are valuable for designers, because we can match our user’s mental model to improve their experience. Consequently, users can easily transfer their knowledge from one product or experience to another without taking time to understand how the new system works. Good user experiences are made possible when the designer’s mental model is aligned with the user’s mental model. The task of shrinking the gap between our mental models and those of our users is one of our biggest challenges, and to achieve this we use a variety of methods: user interviews, personas, journey maps, empathy maps, and more. The point of all this is to gain a deeper insight into not only the goals and objectives of our users but also their pre-existing mental models, and how that applies to the product or experience we are designing.

Soulless Software & How to Create Soul

“It’s about maximum output for minimum input.”

Brad Woods offers an insightful analysis of the concept of “Juice” in software development, including a formidable approach to notions such as “Game Feel” (“Game Feel taps into the human nature of performing actions that have no purpose. They just feel good”), the significance of certain sounds and effects, or the priority of emotional requirements over functional ones whenever we design something that is nonessential, and yet serves a deeper purpose:

Emotion is essential to being human. It’s why music exists in every culture in the World. It’s why some of the great works of humanity are artworks. Not because of their function, but because how they make us feel. […] To create software with soul, ask yourself how do you want the user to feel? Look outside the software industry for inspiration. Find what makes you feel, ask why and use that to shape your work. The greatest crafters in our world across art, design and media do this. They base their work on feelings, opinions, experience, taste, subjectivity and ideas. Nothing averaged out or neutral. Their works built by people for people. They contain hand-crafted touches. They feel like the world around them. In the past, interfaces drew on real-life metaphors to help the user understand them. Steve Jobs took influence from Zen Buddhism and calligraphy. Disney exaggerated physics, developing the 12 basic principles of animation to breathe life into cartoons.