Gatsby Core Concepts

What is Gatsby, anyway? Gatsby is a JAM stack static site generator built with React.

Wait a second, back up. What does any of that mean?

Definitions:

• Static site: a web page with fixed content
• Dynamic site: a site generated in real-time using server technology (PHP, Node, C#, etc.)
• Static site generator: a framework that can compile down things like JavaScript and Markdown into static HTML
• JAM Stack: A modern architecture to build apps with JavaScript, APIs, and Markup without web servers

Core Concepts in Gatsby:

• ReactJS - a UI library built by Facebook
• GraphQL - a query language for handling data in APIs
• Webpack - a modern bundling system for building JavaScript applications
• CSS-in-JS - using JavaScript to declare CSS styles (sometimes called JSS)
• Markdown - a simple markup language used for writing

Gatsby Vocabulary:

• Gatsby docs: http://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs
• Gatsby CLI - the command line interface used to generate, build, and serve Gatsby sites
• Starters - templates you can use to build Gatsby sites
• Plugins - points of extensibility for Gatsby

Helpful Links

• JAMStack.org
• The Gatsby Ecosystem
• ReactJS Docs
• GraphQL
• Webpack
• CSS-in-JS
• Styled Components
• Gatsby Docs
• Jason Lengstorf
• gatsby-starter-egghead-blog