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Jamstack

Fast and secure sites and apps delivered by pre-rendering files and serving them directly from a CDN, removing the requirement to manage or run web servers.
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The New Stack Icon The New Stack

Netlify acquires Gatsby

Richard MacManus from The New Stack spoke with Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann about the deal and their new catchphrase: “composable architectures”

Biilmann described it as a “change away from monolithic solutions,” citing a couple of examples: Adobe Experience Manager “as the DXP [digital experience platform] system for all your web productions” and Drupal “as the core engine that both powers the backend and the frontend of your site, the business logic and the UI layer, and so on.” He argues that these types of “monolithic” solutions can “start to feel very legacy and very dated.”

I’m not sure if “composable architectures” will stick, but they sure did a good job of making “jamstack” a thing, so time will tell on that.

Aftab Alam aalam.in

Get up & running with Astro

This is part 1 of a 5-part series on learning Astro, a new-kid-on-the-block static site builder that’s capturing the hearts of web developers due to its Bring Your Own Framework (BYOF) approach and Zero Emitted JS (ZEJS?) by default.

Throughout this series, I’ll walk you, step-by-step, through building an Astro-based blog(codenamed: Astro-Ink). You’ll discover more of Astro, its benefits, and super-interesting constructs and patterns that Astro brings to the table.

Cory Etzkorn notion.so

Notion's journey to Next.js

What Vercel has enabled teams to do with Next.js is next level, and it’s truly evident when you read stories like this one from Cory Etzkorn on Notion migrating their marketing site to Next.js.

We rebuilt our entire marketing site from scratch, choosing to go with a statically generated architecture over our former purely client-rendered approach. Two months and 109 React components later, we’ve now fully migrated to our framework of choice, Next.js, and couldn’t be happier with our decision. Here’s how we got there.

Notion's journey to Next.js

The Register Icon The Register

WordPress's Matt debates Netlify's Matt

If you missed this exchange between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann at the recent Jamstack Conf, read this to get the tldr. Here’s a section of the conversation to focus on…

Public debate kicked off at the end of August, with Mullenweg telling reporter Richard MacManus: “Jamstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it…”

“I don’t think the era of WordPress is over,” Mullenweg added. “I think we’re going to reach over 50 per cent market share in the next few years.”

This is not so much to do with architecture, but rather because users love software-as-a-service, whereas Jamstack is about custom development. There is not yet a Jamstack equivalent to the likes of Shopify, Squarespace or Wix, all mentioned as growing businesses.

WordPress and Jamstack are not completely in opposition. “I still think WordPress can play a really important role in the future ecosystem,” said Biilmann. The pattern he said he sees is WordPress used as a headless service, with developers “completely being in control of the front end layer.”

Sarah Drasner Smashing Magazine

Migrating from WordPress To JAMStack

WordPress is MASSIVE — so why would a site using WordPress consider moving to JAMstack? This technical case study from Sarah Drasner covers how Smashing Magazine manages their content and what an actual WordPress migration looks like (using Smashing Magazine).

In this two-part article series, we’ll cover what an actual WordPress migration looks like, using a case study of the very site you’re reading from right now.

We’ll talk through the gains and losses, the things we wish we knew earlier, and what we were surprised by. And then we’ll follow it up with a technical demonstration of one possible migration path, not off WordPress completely, but how you can serve decoupled WordPress so that you can have the best of both worlds: a JAMstack implementation of WordPress that gives you all the power of their dashboard and functionality, with better performance and security.

Chris Coyier CSS-Tricks

JAMstack vs. Jamstack

Chris Coyier:

The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.

I prefer JAMstack, myself, but I think the Ajax analogy he quotes is an apt one. Aside: if this trend continues, Chris and the team might need to rename the site to “Jamstack-Tricks” soon.

Oh, and while we’re here: It’s Changelog not ChangeLog 😄

CSS-Tricks Icon CSS-Tricks

The rising complexity of JAMStack sites and how to manage them

When you add anything with user-generated content or dynamic data to a static site, the complexity of the build process can become comparable to launching a monolithic CMS. How can we add rich content to static sites without stitching together multiple third-party services?

Every time I get into the nitty gritty of JAMStack implementations with anything but static content sites I end up saying (or merely thinking to myself), “This sounds like a whole lot of work to avoid some server-side rendering…”

This piece on CSS Tricks appears to back up that premonition:

Despite my enthusiasm, I’m often disheartened by the steep complexity curve I typically encounter about halfway through a JAMstack project. Normally the first few weeks are incredibly liberating. It’s easy to get started, there is good visible progress, everything feels lean and fast. Over time, as more features are added, the build steps become more complex, multiple APIs are added, and suddenly everything feels slow. In other words, the development experience begins to suffer.

The good news is there are many smart, talented folks working on solving the various challenges that JAMStack sites face.

Quincy Larson freeCodeCamp

Lessons from 5 years of teaching the world to code

Congrats to Quincy and everyone who has joined his mission with freeCodeCamp on an astounding rise:

More than 40,000 freeCodeCamp graduates are now working in tech at companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Spotify.

Millions of people watch freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel each month.

Millions of people read freecodecamp.org/news each month.

And people ask - and answer - thousands of tech-related questions each month on freecodecamp.org/forum.

freeCodeCamp.org is now one of the most-used technology sites on the entire web.

The future is bright. Click through to read what they accomplished in 2019 and how they’re up and running on a JAMstack.

Smashing Magazine Icon Smashing Magazine

Demystifying JAMstack: an interview with Phil Hawskworth

JAMStack is all that, whole grain low fat, I know you want a piece of that…

No but seriously now, I love what’s going on with the JAMstack and the implications for performance, security, and maintainability.

Not sure what this stack even is? Why should you care? In this interview, Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine talks with Phil Hawksworth from Netlify about what it is all about:

JAMstack is all about a way of deploying and serving websites that don’t rely on an origin server, they don’t rely on requests hitting an active server all the time.

Chris Coyier CSS-Tricks

Using Netlify functions to send emails with a JAMstack-style site

How do you send email from a JAMstack-style site? Chris Coyer writes on CSS-Tricks:

Let’s say you’re rocking a JAMstack-style site (no server-side languages in use), but you want to do something rather dynamic like send an email. Not a problem! That’s the whole point of JAMstack. It’s not just static hosting. It’s that plus doing anything else you wanna do through JavaScript and APIs. Here’s the setup…

link Icon getpublii.com

Publii - Open source CMS for static websites

Bob Mitro, Owner of Publii:

Unlike static-site generators that are often unwieldy and difficult to use, Publii provides an easy-to-understand UI much like server-based CMSs such as WordPress or Joomla!, where users can create posts and other site content, and style their site using a variety of built-in themes and options.

I love static-site generators, my favorite being Jekyll. The performance and security benefits are pretty amazing. Still, I have to agree with Bob here, they’re not always easy to use for non-developers. Publii looks like a nice option for clients or those of us who prefer a nice UI.

Chris Manson github.com

A Fully-functional, SEO-friendly static site blog system built on Ember

This project is designed to be a fully-functional, static site implementation of a blog system that is mostly compatible with Ghost and is built on EmberJS with fully working out of the box SEO friendly output. It supports being hosted on AWS S3 or any other static site hosting solution.

Check out the demo. It’s 100% static and hosted on S3. 🎉

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