Astro Launches New Server Islands and Partners With Netlify

Astro had a big week, announcing its 4.12 release along with a new partnership with Netlify, which now sponsors Astro as its official deployment partner.

We’ll be covering the partnership in more depth next week, but the big news in this Astro release is that it includes the first experimental release of Server Islands, which are the framework’s “new solution to integrate high-performance static HTML and dynamic server-generated components together.”

Astro introduced islands in 2021. They allow developers to create “ islands” of interactive client-side components while most of the page is generated statically. This extends the same architecture to the server, Astro said.

“Server islands make it easy to combine high-performance static HTML and dynamic server-generated components,” the team stated.

Within a given page, static content can live alongside dynamic content that changes infrequently and personalized content that’s tailored to individual users, Astro explained.

“Server islands are used for your most dynamic content; personalized content like a user’s avatar, their shopping cart, and product reviews,” the team explained. “When these components are deferred, you’re free to more aggressively cache the page itself.”

The post also notes that Server Islands “have a lot in common with partial prerendering (PPR), especially in its goal of allowing increased cacheability of pages.”. The post includes a side-by-side comparison of Server Islands and partial pre-rendering.

Netlify also wrote about Astro Server Islands in its developer blog, explaining that Server Islands are different than the standard Astro Islands, “which improve performance by allowing you to selectively ‘hydrate’ components, i.e. load JavaScript only for components that need it, instead of making the entire page interactive.” A component can be both an Island and a Server Island, the post noted. It even offers an example site that Netlify users can clone and deploy to Netlify.

Server Islands also allow users to see the most critical parts of the page instantly, even when they’re not logged in, because they’re cached on Edge CDNs, Astro explained, adding that fallback content will be visible before the dynamic islands load.

“Each island is loaded independent from the rest; this means a slower island, such as one connected to a legacy backend, won’t delay the rest of personalized content from being seen and interacted with,” the Astro team noted.

In addition to Server Islands, this release includes:

• First and last URLs to pagination data
• Support for the Shiki’s defaultColor option
• New inferRemoteSize function

VR Creation App Google Blocks Open Sourced

Google has open sourced Google Blocks, which is a VR creation app that allows you to create 3D objects and scenes. It’s now available on GitHub as an archived repository under the Apache 2.0 license.

Blocks was originally released for for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in 2017.

“We now wish to share the code behind Google Blocks, allowing for novel and rich experiences to emerge from the creativity and passion of open source contributors such as the Icosa Foundation, who have already been doing wonderful work with Tilt Brush, which we open-sourced in 2021,” Google wrote in its announcement of the decision.

It’s worth noting that Google Blocks is not an actively developed product, and no pull requests will be accepted.

“The currently published version of Google Blocks will remain available in digital stores for users with supported VR headsets,” Google software engineer Ian MacGillivray wrote.

Slint 1.7 Releases With New Widgets

Slint 1.7 was released this week with new widgets and multi-window support.

The Rust-based tool is used to develop UIs for a range of operating systems and processor architectures, including Linux macOS, Windows, WebAssembly, Blackberry QNX, and bare metal. It allows JavaScript developers to create native interfaces for embedded and desktop applications, and to interact with Rust or C++ libraries to build the UI interface.

This latest release incorporates new DatePickerPopup and TimePickerPopup widgets to let users enter dates and times. These widgets adhere to the Material Design and are available cross-platform, according to the Slint blog.

The update also includes a live-preview redesign to realign the toolbar, a redesign of the component library, and added a brand-new property editor. Slint 1.7 also incorporates bug fixes and new APIs.

Vercel Functions Adds New Utilities

Vercel Functions now includes new utilities, including one related to geolocation data, the company’s changelog noted this week. The new functions are:

• geolocation: Returns location information of the incoming request
• ipAddress: Returns the IP address of the incoming request
• getEnv: Returns system environment variables from Vercel

Developers will need to install the latest package to use these methods.
pnpm i @vercel/functions​

WP Engine Acquires Speed Optimization SaaS

WP Engine has added a SaaS solution that helps optimize speed for frontend sites, the company added this week. It acquired NitroPack, which is a WordPress optimization SaaS solution. Previously, WP Engine customers were able to leverage some of NitroPack’s technology via Page Speed Boost.

“Since its launch, Page Speed Boost adoption has consistently grown with customers seeing significant improvements in Google Lighthouse scores, which measure Core Web Vitals,” the company stated in a prepared release. “These include a 34% average improvement in desktop scores and a 132% average improvement in mobile scores.”

WP Engine’s Chief Product Officer Ezinne Udezue said the deal will enable WP Engine’s customers to use NitroPack’s technology “more broadly, as future innovations will allow them to tailor NitroPack’s features to their specific site needs.”

WP Engine is a WordPress management and optimization company with 1.5 million customers globally.