Static web generator

Question

Recently, I was asked to create a web page using a static website generator such as Jekyll. My question is this:

• How does this differ from just creating a website using HTML or writing a page as an ASP.net project in Visual Studio?
• How does it work on the server?
• What are some issues I should have?

I am a .net guy, so I would like to be able to create this in visual studio, if possible.

Answer 1

Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages that come to my mind:

<strong> Benefits

• can be deployed on each server since it is just static html
• has partial ones that can be reused, unlike normal html, where you need to encode / copy all elements
• you can still use IDE code
• no developer can edit the code (sometimes at least)

disadvantages

• the template language is limited and sometimes a little uncomfortable / should get used to
• you have something new in your environment that has additional costs (more than one developer needs to know how to create a site, ...)

If you know your current toolkit well and you have no problems hosting another ASP.net project on your server, I don’t see the need to implement another tool in the tool.

If you want to do something where users can generate content - like github on github pages - this is what you might think.

As for Jekyll, we tried it in one project and are developers who like to code, we came across its limitations quite early. You can get around this, but if you know a programming language, you will be faster. It was still fascinating how far we could with Jekyll.

Answer 2

ASP.NET pages exist throughout the life of a page and can work with request and session context. See Asp.net page lifecycle article. HTML pages are static and you cannot access any variable that resides on the server.

I recommend that you follow the step-by-step link to this link to just understand how to develop ASP.NET http://www.asp.net/get-started

I hope this helps

Vicente