Jamstack

JAMstack is a new and modern way of building websites and apps. The “JAM” comes from JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. The JAM stack is not about specific technologies. It’s a new way of building websites and apps that delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience.

There are three main pillars for the JAMstack

JS + APIs + Markup = JAM

Javascript running on the client handles all the events/dynamic programming in the application cycle.

API is the abstraction for backend services where re-usable API’s (includes any third-party provider) are accessed directly over HTTP with JS.

Markup is used for rendering HTML content; this also includes build tools for web apps. This has to be built for deploying.

Just over 4 years ago, it was common for developers to use a CMS for their client’s website. Sites were easy to organize/maintain and the clients would be able to manage the content themselves (saving developers countless hours of unofficial customer support).In short, everybody won and happy.

What is Jamstack?

It represents a modern web development architecture that gives developers an opportunity to rely on the advantages of a static website, which include better web performance and security benefits, while still retaining the dynamic attributes of a database-oriented CMS without the database.

As a content editor, there’s always a worry that when you publish new content, something will happen, or your site will go down unexpectedly (maybe even in the middle of the night). JAMstack takes that worry away. Not having to manage a site, means less support. Instead, you can use your resources to increase user engagement, increasing the speed of your websites, and improving the user experience (UX) and design experience.

JAMstack the rules and benefits are quite self-explanatory and straightforward:

• JavaScript (on the client-side) is carrying out dynamic programming during the request/response cycle.
• Reusable APIs are accessed via HTTPS with JavaScript abstract all server-side processes or database actions.
• The templated markup ought to be prebuilt at deploy time, utilizing a site generator or a build tool for web apps.

Benefits of using Jamstack:

Using the JAMstack has multiple other benefits to end-users and developers as well. End users obviously will be able to receive updates/changes to the site faster, and because of the pre-rendered, non-origin server aspect of the stack, the sites are by default going to be faster.

Developers and development teams can benefit from the stack for a lost of reasons. First and foremost, they don’t need to manage servers, and there are fewer DevOps related tasks being added to standard development related tasks. Even when some server-side code execution is required, Serverless Functions can come to the rescue. In the JAMstack there’s no server-side code execution, and by default, all the site content is “static”, and it’s placed on a CDN server. The attack surface area is a lot smaller.

Jamstack System:

Most JAMStack case-studies are not those which are static marketing sites, but those with a genuine need for dynamic features.

Bargad Software Solutions itself requires advanced search capabilities, basic e-commerce features, a multi-user CMS and an integrated comments system. These are integral features of the success and functionality of their business and have already been excluded by their choice of the stack.

Instead of these being your problems (as the developer), and choosing if/when to farm them out to third-party services, the JAMStack leaves you with little choice other than to distribute responsibility to a variety of 3rd parties. In much the same way as server-less is just “someone else’s server”, the JAMStack usually requires “someone else’s backend”.

Challenges while working with Jamstack:

The first project in Janstack and we had to create an appropriate structure for this headless CMS from scratch and, to be honest, everything was a bit of a surprise for us.

What I really liked was how much customizable components we could create with keeping it clear and easy-to-use for the editors. We had a really hard time trying to optimize this third-party solution with JAMstack. One of the issues was dealing with their script loading — we used more than one form on the website and we were struggling with it displaying.

But we made it incredibly simple to customize, expand, or rebuild pages, which impressed the team the most.

Performance-wise, they were happy as well Thanks to the JAMstack tools we used.

If you’d like to modernize your WordPress development and reap the performance and security benefits of JAMstack, read on!and reach us and communicate with our experts.