8 ms·

I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convi

I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train. 2. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework and build pipeline that requires organizations invest a lot of resources into switching. (Gatsby gets most of this for free by building on top of the Cool Kid Stack's nine-thousand-package NPM lasagna.) 3. Sell their captive audience expensive solutions to problems they wouldn't have with other frameworks. (See e.g. another commentor's discussion of incremental builds.) This strategy might not contribute much to society, but neither do a lot of other startups--what matters to investors is that it'll probably make them a lot of money, assuming they execute it correctly.

lsalvatore 7y ago
Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?
- dplgk 7y ago
  Well, it's not really targeted at actual developers.
  - fastball 7y ago
    You need to know JS to use Gatsby, so... seems like development to me?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  - wp381640 7y ago
    > I wrote one once, and it was a couple hundred lines of code. This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain edit: rather than cheapshot with a throwaway comment i'll expand on this - from my experience what Gatsby provides is an open source pluggable info processing pipeline. I'm really interested in seeing it develop as a replacement for some of the larger and much more expensive and proprietary internal knowledge and content management systems which provide a ton of plugins to tap into resevoirs and allow you to process/publish internally
    - onion2k 7y ago
      I use Gatsby and I like it, but the alternative is a few hundred lines of code if you're doing what Gatsby says it does (eg a static site generator for markdown files). The fact Gatsby can do much more doesn't mean everyone who uses it is doing the other stuff. If you just want a static site Gatsby is overkill.
  - chrisweekly 7y ago
    I take issue with your tone and cynicism, and disagree w/ your premise. Your sarcasm and condescension aren't helpful. And there's no way your "couple hundred lines of code" addressed more than a fraction of the real-world use cases addressed by Gatsby. You cast aspersions on a huge swath of your peers who work with the best tools at hand to solve difficult problems... it's not just arrogant, it's ignorant. IME it's the ultimate poser/hipster move to denigrate modern web dev (your so-called "Cool Kid Stack"), while ignoring the ways in which the world has changed (and become more complicated and challenging) since you formed your ideas about simple HTML-generating scripts being sufficient to meet the requirements of a modern web application. The true "continuous source of churn and maintenance work" is the problem space -- endlessly diverse clients on radically heterogenous devices with highly variable network conditions, and end-user expectations that only ever ratchet in the direction of faster, more secure, more reliable, more polished experiences. I feel your pain about keeping up with tools that can empower teams to address these challenges; but to suggest that the stack is to blame, that the complexity is unnecessary and arises from self-interested outfits looking to build a moat? Nonsense. I write all this as a 21-year veteran of web development-related work, and in the spirit of respectful disagreement.
    - graphememes 7y ago
      Except a couple hundred lines of code could address the issues that Gatsby addresses. The posters here aren't wrong. It is an overhyped, overbloated, overconfig heavy stack that ultimately renders static html. I have used them, they are exactly as these posters say.
      - dunerat 7y ago
        do you have any suggestions for people like myself, who aren't interested in or are not capable of building their own proprietary static site generator? Any tools that meet similar needs to those that gatsby meets that you would recommend and why?
        quickthrower2 7y ago
        Wordpress has plugins that can export the site as a static site.
  - dang 7y ago
    "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - networkimprov 7y ago
      It's a dismissal for sure, but the original comment doesn't read as shallow to me.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - geofft 7y ago
      The frustrating thing is, how, precisely, are you supposed to teach that every bit of complexity isn't necessary, the world hasn't changed, and a few-hundred-line solution works fine? This is an entirely serious question. I've got multiple few-hundred-line projects in development at work replacing internal tools - yes, they solve 90% of the use cases but the remaining 10% were generally either ill-advised or theoretical - and I don't know either how to get teams of developers not to build bloated messes or how to communicate that my smaller product shouldn't be taken less seriously for having fewer LOC.
      - dang 7y ago
        I totally agree that it's a legitimate concern. I share it. From an internet comment point of view, the first thing is to steer clear of, say, the top 5 "you suck" sorts of comment. Because if you fall into one of those, or get interpreted that way, then you're not teaching anybody anything, just putting someone down and encouraging worse from others. If you know more and have something to teach—and accidental software complexity is an extremely under-taught topic—the burden is on you to establish a context in which real communication is possible. How do you do that? I'm not sure; we could probably exchange notes on this for hours.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Not OP but the mess that is node and its ecosystem is indeed overly-complicated
  - emilsedgh 7y ago
    Care to elaborate? In what regard?
    - tomc1985 7y ago
      The other comment does a good job illustrating
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration sliiightly different. Honestly I got so frustrated with dealing with dependency hell the other day that I only half-jokingly said I was going to go back to writing vanilla ES5, whichever the last version that still works on IE is. It's just too much of an obscure headache, too much tooling and intermediary steps. I can't get our error reporting tool to work properly because the source maps are a confusing jumble either. Mind you this is aimed at the JS ecosystem in its current state; Gatsby itself has been great.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling, and nothing else. Life is great.
- k__ 7y ago
  At least in the React eco-system I got the feeling that Gatsby does mostly it's own thing. You can setup a Next.js system with mostly regular React skills.
gexla 7y ago
> Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over The Gatsby homepage mentions Wordpress as a possible data source. I don't evens see mention of their CMS on the front page. The only "service" I see them advertising there is Preview - which seems to be a development collaboration tool. I don't think they're convincing people to move away from Wordpress. It's funny that the article talks about moving away from your monolithic "CMS system" (redundant?) so that you can use headless Wordpress or Drupal. In other words, you get to toss your monolithic content management system system so that you can keep your monolithic content management system system.
- manigandham 7y ago
  This is the fundamental issue. Gatsby is a modern frontend framework that optimizes the visual experience and interactivity of a site, relying on React as the base tech. It's not an end-to-end solution though, and still requires a backend to provide the data itself, whether that's flat files at build time or a running CMS engine. Compared to Wordpress, Ghost, and Webflow, it seems the market size for this is limited.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Content managers like WordPress and have lots of experience with it. Using it as a backend is fine. Gatsby on the frontend has advantages (speed, security, etc). Combining the two makes a lot of sense.
  - cies 7y ago
    Yes. It does. And it means you will use WP in a head-less setup. The main problem is not using a large part of your WP codebase (so much for lean and mean) and that some features in WP dont work as expected. Now you may want to keep WP up to date and the cost for this may be bigger then a head-less SaaS CMS.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Yeah this isn't a Wordpress replacement; it's a framework for creating websites and / or hybrid websites, the way I see it. In that regard it competes with Next, Nest and Nuxt (I don't even know the last two, I lifted that from https://slides.com/seldo/jsconf-eu-2019#/60 https://slides.com/seldo/jsconf-eu-2019#/60 ; are those all based on / similar to Next? They should fix their naming)
eagsalazar2 7y ago
OMG what a great comment. I can't see your upvotes but I hope it was in the 1000s!
petra 7y ago
It should be pretty easy to auto-generate static sites from wordpress. Shifter and HardyPress already do so. That gets you all the advantages of static sites, combined with all the advantages of WordPress(ecosystem, tools, affordable labor, easy to use by clients). Their only major limitation is that they generate/"compile" the whole site, and this takes time. But that seems solvable by caching(in most cases) and by scaling(which may be easy with serverless). I think it's just a matter of time.
- cies 7y ago
  A lot of WP features do not work in this case. The infra need to get this working is also not simple. And finally the code produced to get this to work (the mess of "hooks" called filters in WP iirc) does not at all resemble the clean React code base of my Gatsby website project. I argue maintainability is the main reason for me to choose Gatsby over WP for projects where the choice makes sense.
  - petra 7y ago
    Sure, database driven WP features, don't work - As they should. You just need to select your plugins from a smaller set, and use external services like disqus for database based service. And i think with time that thinking could lead to a set of plugins with good security through isolation. As for hosting complexity - for many sites, this could be hidden from the developer and the client. And regarding code complexity - how often are custom wordpress plugins or themes(without a site builder) required ? and how much developer time does it take ?
  - illuminea 7y ago
    Most WordPress plugins work with a statically generated WP site. For functionality that generally demands db communication, there are many services that have been created for use on static sites that can be used on WP too. We created a static tools directory for our users on Strattic so that they can easily find those types of services when moving their sites to Strattic, or building for Strattic: https://www.strattic.com/static-tools/ https://www.strattic.com/static-tools/
- 7y ago
sbmthakur 7y ago
> I don't really like Gatsby's product May I know why you don't like it and what alternatives you will recommend (if any)? I am considering Gatsby for building a site.
- innocentoldguy 7y ago
  I can’t speak for the OP, but I like Hugo better than Gatsby as far as static site generators go. I think Hugo is easier to use and is a lot faster at generating sites. Gatsby does more than that, so it may be a good choice when you need something more than a static site generator; however, if I’m going to have to dick around with programming anyway I’d rather work with anything other than Node/JavaScript. EDIT: I forgot to mention Zola, which I like quite well as far as static site generators go. It doesn’t have the support for multilingual sites that Hugo does, but its templating is much nicer, I think.
srirachafari 7y ago
Yeah I dont think their target market is established enterprise commerce companies
shams93 7y ago
Yeah you look at hugo there are 0 npm dependencies while you can use it with react and and npm based build its optional which is nice. Now that the vast majority of browsers use script type="module" there is no longer a dire need for npm, es6 modules can now be used without a complex webpack process behind their inclusion.

lsalvatore 7y ago

Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?

dplgk 7y ago
Well, it's not really targeted at actual developers.
- fastball 7y ago
  You need to know JS to use Gatsby, so... seems like development to me?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
- wp381640 7y ago
  > I wrote one once, and it was a couple hundred lines of code. This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain edit: rather than cheapshot with a throwaway comment i'll expand on this - from my experience what Gatsby provides is an open source pluggable info processing pipeline. I'm really interested in seeing it develop as a replacement for some of the larger and much more expensive and proprietary internal knowledge and content management systems which provide a ton of plugins to tap into resevoirs and allow you to process/publish internally
  - onion2k 7y ago
    I use Gatsby and I like it, but the alternative is a few hundred lines of code if you're doing what Gatsby says it does (eg a static site generator for markdown files). The fact Gatsby can do much more doesn't mean everyone who uses it is doing the other stuff. If you just want a static site Gatsby is overkill.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  I take issue with your tone and cynicism, and disagree w/ your premise. Your sarcasm and condescension aren't helpful. And there's no way your "couple hundred lines of code" addressed more than a fraction of the real-world use cases addressed by Gatsby. You cast aspersions on a huge swath of your peers who work with the best tools at hand to solve difficult problems... it's not just arrogant, it's ignorant. IME it's the ultimate poser/hipster move to denigrate modern web dev (your so-called "Cool Kid Stack"), while ignoring the ways in which the world has changed (and become more complicated and challenging) since you formed your ideas about simple HTML-generating scripts being sufficient to meet the requirements of a modern web application. The true "continuous source of churn and maintenance work" is the problem space -- endlessly diverse clients on radically heterogenous devices with highly variable network conditions, and end-user expectations that only ever ratchet in the direction of faster, more secure, more reliable, more polished experiences. I feel your pain about keeping up with tools that can empower teams to address these challenges; but to suggest that the stack is to blame, that the complexity is unnecessary and arises from self-interested outfits looking to build a moat? Nonsense. I write all this as a 21-year veteran of web development-related work, and in the spirit of respectful disagreement.
  - graphememes 7y ago
    Except a couple hundred lines of code could address the issues that Gatsby addresses. The posters here aren't wrong. It is an overhyped, overbloated, overconfig heavy stack that ultimately renders static html. I have used them, they are exactly as these posters say.
    - dunerat 7y ago
      do you have any suggestions for people like myself, who aren't interested in or are not capable of building their own proprietary static site generator? Any tools that meet similar needs to those that gatsby meets that you would recommend and why?
      - quickthrower2 7y ago
        Wordpress has plugins that can export the site as a static site.
- dang 7y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - networkimprov 7y ago
    It's a dismissal for sure, but the original comment doesn't read as shallow to me.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - geofft 7y ago
    The frustrating thing is, how, precisely, are you supposed to teach that every bit of complexity isn't necessary, the world hasn't changed, and a few-hundred-line solution works fine? This is an entirely serious question. I've got multiple few-hundred-line projects in development at work replacing internal tools - yes, they solve 90% of the use cases but the remaining 10% were generally either ill-advised or theoretical - and I don't know either how to get teams of developers not to build bloated messes or how to communicate that my smaller product shouldn't be taken less seriously for having fewer LOC.
    - dang 7y ago
      I totally agree that it's a legitimate concern. I share it. From an internet comment point of view, the first thing is to steer clear of, say, the top 5 "you suck" sorts of comment. Because if you fall into one of those, or get interpreted that way, then you're not teaching anybody anything, just putting someone down and encouraging worse from others. If you know more and have something to teach—and accidental software complexity is an extremely under-taught topic—the burden is on you to establish a context in which real communication is possible. How do you do that? I'm not sure; we could probably exchange notes on this for hours.
tomc1985 7y ago
Not OP but the mess that is node and its ecosystem is indeed overly-complicated
- emilsedgh 7y ago
  Care to elaborate? In what regard?
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    The other comment does a good job illustrating
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration sliiightly different. Honestly I got so frustrated with dealing with dependency hell the other day that I only half-jokingly said I was going to go back to writing vanilla ES5, whichever the last version that still works on IE is. It's just too much of an obscure headache, too much tooling and intermediary steps. I can't get our error reporting tool to work properly because the source maps are a confusing jumble either. Mind you this is aimed at the JS ecosystem in its current state; Gatsby itself has been great.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling, and nothing else. Life is great.
k__ 7y ago
At least in the React eco-system I got the feeling that Gatsby does mostly it's own thing. You can setup a Next.js system with mostly regular React skills.

gexla 7y ago

> Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over The Gatsby homepage mentions Wordpress as a possible data source. I don't evens see mention of their CMS on the front page. The only "service" I see them advertising there is Preview - which seems to be a development collaboration tool. I don't think they're convincing people to move away from Wordpress. It's funny that the article talks about moving away from your monolithic "CMS system" (redundant?) so that you can use headless Wordpress or Drupal. In other words, you get to toss your monolithic content management system system so that you can keep your monolithic content management system system.

manigandham 7y ago
This is the fundamental issue. Gatsby is a modern frontend framework that optimizes the visual experience and interactivity of a site, relying on React as the base tech. It's not an end-to-end solution though, and still requires a backend to provide the data itself, whether that's flat files at build time or a running CMS engine. Compared to Wordpress, Ghost, and Webflow, it seems the market size for this is limited.
onion2k 7y ago
Content managers like WordPress and have lots of experience with it. Using it as a backend is fine. Gatsby on the frontend has advantages (speed, security, etc). Combining the two makes a lot of sense.
- cies 7y ago
  Yes. It does. And it means you will use WP in a head-less setup. The main problem is not using a large part of your WP codebase (so much for lean and mean) and that some features in WP dont work as expected. Now you may want to keep WP up to date and the cost for this may be bigger then a head-less SaaS CMS.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Yeah this isn't a Wordpress replacement; it's a framework for creating websites and / or hybrid websites, the way I see it. In that regard it competes with Next, Nest and Nuxt (I don't even know the last two, I lifted that from https://slides.com/seldo/jsconf-eu-2019#/60 https://slides.com/seldo/jsconf-eu-2019#/60 ; are those all based on / similar to Next? They should fix their naming)

eagsalazar2 7y ago

OMG what a great comment. I can't see your upvotes but I hope it was in the 1000s!

petra 7y ago

It should be pretty easy to auto-generate static sites from wordpress. Shifter and HardyPress already do so. That gets you all the advantages of static sites, combined with all the advantages of WordPress(ecosystem, tools, affordable labor, easy to use by clients). Their only major limitation is that they generate/"compile" the whole site, and this takes time. But that seems solvable by caching(in most cases) and by scaling(which may be easy with serverless). I think it's just a matter of time.

cies 7y ago
A lot of WP features do not work in this case. The infra need to get this working is also not simple. And finally the code produced to get this to work (the mess of "hooks" called filters in WP iirc) does not at all resemble the clean React code base of my Gatsby website project. I argue maintainability is the main reason for me to choose Gatsby over WP for projects where the choice makes sense.
- petra 7y ago
  Sure, database driven WP features, don't work - As they should. You just need to select your plugins from a smaller set, and use external services like disqus for database based service. And i think with time that thinking could lead to a set of plugins with good security through isolation. As for hosting complexity - for many sites, this could be hidden from the developer and the client. And regarding code complexity - how often are custom wordpress plugins or themes(without a site builder) required ? and how much developer time does it take ?
- illuminea 7y ago
  Most WordPress plugins work with a statically generated WP site. For functionality that generally demands db communication, there are many services that have been created for use on static sites that can be used on WP too. We created a static tools directory for our users on Strattic so that they can easily find those types of services when moving their sites to Strattic, or building for Strattic: https://www.strattic.com/static-tools/ https://www.strattic.com/static-tools/
7y ago

sbmthakur 7y ago

> I don't really like Gatsby's product May I know why you don't like it and what alternatives you will recommend (if any)? I am considering Gatsby for building a site.

innocentoldguy 7y ago
I can’t speak for the OP, but I like Hugo better than Gatsby as far as static site generators go. I think Hugo is easier to use and is a lot faster at generating sites. Gatsby does more than that, so it may be a good choice when you need something more than a static site generator; however, if I’m going to have to dick around with programming anyway I’d rather work with anything other than Node/JavaScript. EDIT: I forgot to mention Zola, which I like quite well as far as static site generators go. It doesn’t have the support for multilingual sites that Hugo does, but its templating is much nicer, I think.

srirachafari 7y ago

Yeah I dont think their target market is established enterprise commerce companies

shams93 7y ago

Yeah you look at hugo there are 0 npm dependencies while you can use it with react and and npm based build its optional which is nice. Now that the vast majority of browsers use script type="module" there is no longer a dire need for npm, es6 modules can now be used without a complex webpack process behind their inclusion.