While Next.js can handle static sites, we've had a few issues with it, notably a performance hit at runtime and some bugginess around routing and SSR. Gatsby being fully intended for high-performance static sites makes it a great technical fit for the Shields frontend. The `createPages()` API should be a really nice way to add a page for each service family, for example.
This migrates the frontend from Next.js to Gatsby. Gatsby is a powerful tool, which has a bit of downside as there's a lot to dig through. Overall I found configuration easier than Next.js. There are a lot of plugins and for the most part they worked out of the box. The documentation is good.
Links are cleaner now: there is no #. This will break old links though perhaps we could add some redirection to help with that. The only one I’m really concerned about `/#/endpoint`. I’m not sure if folks are deep-linking to the category pages.
There are a lot of enhancements we could add, in order to speed up the site even more. In particular we could think about inlining the SVGs rather than making separate requests for each one.
While Gatsby recommends GraphQL, it's not required. To keep things simple and reduce the learning curve, I did not use it here.
Close#1943Fix#2837Fix#2616
These tests should fail if something is accidentally changed that affects the SVG or JSON files. In the case of deliberate changes, we can update the snapshots.
I rewrote the frontend in React using a module bundler. It's matched feature-for-feature with the current frontend, with only slight changes in the styling. I did not fuss about making the styling identical; the badge popup looks particularly different.
This makes the front end much easier to develop. I'm really looking forward to implementing #701, to which this paves the way.
This makes light use of Next.js, which provides webpack config and dev/build tooling. We’ll probably replace it with create-react-app or our own webpack setup because unfortunately it comes with a lot of runtime overhead (the build is 400k).
Let’s open new issues for bugs and features, and track other follow-ups here: https://github.com/badges/shields/projects/1
