Cloudflare has acquired the core team behind the open source JavaScript framework Astro, bringing its creators in-house while pledging to keep Astro fully open source. The New Stack reports: Astro is used by major brands like IKEA, Unilever, Visa and OpenAI to build fast, content-driven websites. Search engines prioritize fast-loading and clean pages, the Cloudflare statement noted. Websites that rely heavily on JavaScript for initial rendering often struggle to deliver the required speed, which hinders search rankings and customer conversions. Pages on Astro serve up only the code needed to display a page in a browser. That's in part because of its Island architecture, which it introduced in 2021. Astro's Islands allow developers to create "islands" of interactive client-side components, while most of the page is generated statically in HTML. Server Islands extend the same architecture to the server. Astro is also UI-agnostic, meaning that while it has its own independent engine, it allows developers to bring in components from React, Svelte, Vue and other frameworks. This makes Astro a preferred choice for building high-performance, content-driven websites optimized for speed, according to Cloudflare. "Over the past few years, we've seen an incredibly diverse range of developers and companies use Astro to build for the web," said Astro's former CTO, Fred Schott, in a post with Cloudflare senior product manager Brendan Irvine-Broque. "At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too -- for our developer docs, website, landing pages and more." They said that the acquisition will allow them to "double down" on making Astro the best framework for content-driven websites.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.