Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has announced a new mechanism for developers to turn static sites into fully dynamic applications, simplifying the process of building full stack applications.
Dubbed Cloudflare Workers, the functionality extends Cloudflare Pages, which enables frontend developers to build sites using the Jamstack framework, into a full stack platform.
Although Cloudflare Pages could only build static pages when it was made generally available earlier in the year, Rita Kozlov, Product Manager, had promised that their long-term plan was to make full-stack application development a walk-in-the-park.
Cloudflare explains that Workers functions just like Pages, but instead of just deploying the frontend it’ll now rollout the backend as well, to help developers deploy serverless functions.
Open beta
According to Cloudflare, developers could theoretically connect Workers to a Pages project, in that you could install Wrangler and manually deploy a Worker by writing your app in both Pages and Workers.
However, starting today, Pages can leverage Workers to deploy serverless functions automatically on your behalf. Cloudflare says developers can kick start the process of building an app, creating a function, or writing an API by choosing from a template in C, C++, JavaScript, or Rust.
“Cloudflare Workers provides a serverless execution environment that allows you to create entirely new applications or augment existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure,” explains Cloudflare.
Cloudflare Workers is currently available as an open beta for everyone to try at no additional cost to their existing Cloudflare plan.
The company has also shared that it is working to improve on the Pages developer experience by adding support for integrated logging and more analytics for the deployed functions.
