December 2019 Summaries

Netlify had a productive year in 2019, with numerous features and resources introduced to improve the platform and support its growing user base. The company made significant advancements in analytics, build plugins, large media storage, data backend integration, deployment efficiency, and development tools. These updates aimed to enhance the overall developer experience, speed up development workflows, and provide better support for JAMstack projects. Netlify also published educational resources, such as a guide on modern web development on the JAMstack and an enterprise whitepaper on delivering web projects 10x faster. The company continues to innovate and expand its offerings, with more big announcements planned for 2020.

Angular now has a static site generator, thanks to HeroDevs and their Scully tool, which pre-renders Angular applications into static HTML pages. This allows for faster page loads and reduced JavaScript usage. With Scully, developers can use plugins to add dynamic data to their apps, such as user information or blog posts, and create a blog using the `@scullyio/init:blog` generate schematic. The generated static site can then be deployed to Netlify for hosting. By using Scully, Angular developers can take advantage of the JAMstack ecosystem's benefits, including faster page loads and reduced server costs.

Angular now has a static site generator (SSG) thanks to the release of Scully, an alpha version developed by HeroDevs, which pre-renders each page in your app to plain HTML and CSS using machine learning techniques. To add it to an existing Angular app, you simply need to run `ng add @scullyio/init` and see your static files in a new dist folder called static alongside your application folder. Scully also supports blog posts and plugins for route and data transformation, offering a powerful tool for the Jamstack, with resources available on its documentation and live release video.

AWS has announced the release of Node.js 12 as the default function runtime for new sites, starting today. This update brings performance improvements and new language features, with Node.js 12 almost catching up to Go in tests. Existing sites can be upgraded to Node.js 12 via the Netlify site settings under Build & deploy > Environment > Environment variables, by setting the AWS_LAMBDA_JS_RUNTIME environment variable to nodejs12.x. The upgrade will trigger a new deployment and allow users to take advantage of the newer runtime.