About Gatsby

Gatsby is react based open source framework to create static websites and static web-apps. It is suitable if we are building portfolio sites or blogs or company home pages.

Why Gatsby ?

1. It will build static sites that are Progressive Web Apps .
2. It will follow the latest Web standards.
3. Eco system.
4. Gatsby sites are optimised and highly performant.
5. It will allow us to work with ReactJs, Webpack, GraphQL, ES6+, Js, Css and CSS-in-JS.

I would like to add one more point i.e Building static sites with react is not easy. Because if we take create-react-app as an example it will focus more on Single Page Apps but for Routing, Seo, Performance and Optimisation we need to do lot of configuration which gatsby provide as default in starter’s.

Gatsby features

1. Supports Reactjs

   which will help us to build reusable components and make things easier to maintain.

2. Webpack

   which will help to create minified and optimised bundles.

3. SCSS and CSS-in-JS

   It has support for SCSS, CSS-in-JavaScript libraries, allow us to manage styles better.

4. Responsive images

   Resizing images based on devices.

5. 600+ Gatsby plugins

   There are lot of gatsby plugins available for responsive-images, data sources, offline support, Mdx and analytics etc…

6. Supports react and npm packages

   We can install any npm package and can use it in the app.

7. GraphQL

   Gatsby collects data from data sources and make it available via GraphQL. The data sources could be any thing databases or json or XML or wordpress or text files etc..

8. Gives Smoother experience to user

   Gatsby will add smoothness to the app with its features and aims at full app like experience borrowing from PWA.