Comment by girvo
7 days ago
> This builds on an insight that seems obvious in retrospect: you can take any “server” framework and get a “static” site out of it by running its “server” during the build and hitting it with a request for every page you want to generate, and then storing the responses on disk
I'm showing my age, but we used to do this using Wordpress ages ago. Like 15 years ago or more haha.
With Moveable Type we even generated .php files with prerendered content in it from the database and using the PHP part of it to add server side dynamic functionalities. This was a very nice balance between a static and a fully dynamic website.
We did, but we were not able to run our PHP in the browser or prerender our jQuery on the server.
> pretender our jQuery on the server.
That came later, but yes we could (we did some wild stuff with v8js in PHP). And I'm convinced that anything in the blog requires either feature, though I get that more complex systems might.
Yeah, I remember all the fun that I had with PhantomJS & friends... My point was that isomorphic/universal/whatever it's called now JS and declarative component frameworks do have some advantages over our WP setups from 15 years ago. Agreed that you should still choose the right tool for the right job though.
I didn’t mean to imply this is something new per se. But many people today are unaware of this technique. It is seeing some resurgence but not as much as I would have liked. Hence the article.