Having content displayed as HTML can be very convenient for certain things, rapidly changing content, accessibility tools, and being able to style it more concisely, are some examples. However when creating a print out you are at the whim of the person printing it keeping the correct styling without any browser/printer adding any extra styling of its own, for this reason I wanted to host a PDF version, to allow people to easily print out or save an offline copy with the styling I originally envisioned.

Ever since I started making use of Docker I have always been at a turmoil on whether a JVM language was the best solution for the job. You see JVM has a great level of support with loads of libraries a number of different languages and great performance, however this comes at a cost of a large runtime environment and memory requirements (not to mention warm up times). On the other hand there are languages like Go that include everything you need to build a webapp in the standard library, produce a small single binary and dont have large memory footprint or startup times. Go felt like a much leaner language better prepared for this era of microservices and small docker containers, that is until GraalVM came about.

One of the things I like most about languages like GoLang is the fact you can create a small executable that holds all the files needed for a server, or any other application. Kotlin, and any other JVM based languages, however always seem to be rather bloated, Kotlin and Spring have often been over 100mb, and even Scala and Play Framework are of a similar size.

I’ve been using my old static site generator setup for years now, when I first started using DocPad it was fast, simple and had the ability to add plugins which made it immensely extensible. However since then development has died down and there have been some questions about how long the development will continue, my site has become more complex requiring a number of additional plugins, and the general performance of DocPad seems to have slowed down (mostly due to the additional plugins ect.)

Static sites are great, they allow you to build a website using nothing but client side tech, and let you host them easily in places like AWS S3, Github/Gitlab pages, or even on an arduino as they dont require any server side code. However they do have one big downside, user interaction.