proposal: Add a "what is the edge" section to the docs.

[sebastiancarlos]

Hello.

For laymen reading the documentation, the concept of "the edge" might sound a bit obscure.

Currently, there are two distinct mentions of "the edge" in the documentation, but, as this article elaborates, it might be a bit difficult to get a full-fledged idea of the edge from reading them.

I'm hereby suggesting, if that's ok, the addition of a "what is the edge" section to the documentation.

Warm wishes to all of you. You're doing a great work. Cheers!

[About7Sharks]

The official Deno youtube channel has videos like Kitson Kelly's "Deno on the Edge" at MelbJS Meetup and Ryan Dahl's "My Dream Stack" at RemixConf 2022 which explain it well.

[sebastiancarlos]

@About7Sharks Thanks a lot for your reply!

After watching the videos, I better understand the reletionship between Fresh, the edge, and Deno Deploy. Still, I think that the documentation could make some clarifications.

In one part of the talk, Ryan Dahl says that "running at the edge" means that the server infrastructure should respond to the user with a geographically close data center.

I find it confusing that the documentation says that "[Fresh] is intended to be deployed to an edge runtime like Deno Deploy." That suggests that Deno Deploy is an "edge runtime" among many others, which is not the case.

I think a better way to put it could be to say that Fresh can run on any server with "deno" (belonging to an edge infrastructure or not.) But actually, Fresh is meant to run on Deno Deploy, which is far more than a simple "edge runtime"; It is a particular runtime infrastructure that also includes concepts like "serverless," "post-Unix," "V8 isolates," and "JIT rendering."

Calling Deno Deploy just "the edge" seems to sell it short and generate confusion.

P.S. I still think it would still be nice to have a global clarification of what the edge is because it looks like there's some inconsistency between Dahl and Kelly's definitions. Kelly says that "edge compute" is an extension of serverless, while Dahl keeps them separate.