JAM Stack - HTTP 203

Jake and Surma talk about the JAMStack, what it means and how it’s useful for web developers.

[jakearchibald]

There's been some feedback here & Twitter that's supportive/outraged of us throwing the JAM stack under a bus, but that absolutely isn't what we were trying to do. We're really positive about JAM stack, as we say in the video, but maybe the odd pisstake in the video detracts from that? Perhaps it's a British/German thing, but lightly poking fun at something isn't an expression of hatred, especially when it's surrounded by positive statements. I mean… In the UK, pisstaking is the strongest public display of friendship.

Anyway, I wanted to specifically call out some of the points we made…

JAM is a buzzword for stuff that was already happening, but so was AJAX, so is PWA. That doesn't stop them being a good thing for the industry to rally around.

JAM might not always be the right choice, but Netlify isn't saying it is. Use the best stack for the job.

squoosh.app is built using JAM patterns (and hosted on Netlify). And as I said, I'd like my blog to use these patterns too, because right now I'm tired of server maintenance.

Anyway, yes, I groan at another buzzword, but in terms of impact, I think JAM is closer to AJAX & PWA than Web 2.0. As in, it has meaning behind it, and when used correctly produces a good user experience.

[GarethMcCumskey]

I think what's missed here is that almost any web app could be built to conform to the idea of the JAMstack. Just because some sites right now aren't JAM stack doesn't mean they couldn't be.

[LucasRweb]

I work in a Media company, with similar challenges as the example mentioned (BBC), we use isomorphic frameworks and strong CDN caching.

[kngjulien_]

So if I understand that correctly JAM does not mean Serverless or static only, it just means that you have a static js/html/css site that connects to a backend using REST, right?

[abdulmohsen]

How about this one: (React app + headless CMS).
Is it JAM or JAMn't ?

[hypersonic]

Regarding generating all content up front using the build system...IMO it’s much simpler and as performant to generate each document the first time it’s requested then shove it in Redis! There’s some great reading around on how Reddit was originally architected, and it included a huge amount of memcached storage.

[Vanit]

This video is the first time I've heard the term JAMstack. Previously I knew it as "oh god I don't want to deal with server-side html composition again unless I have to".

[quietfox]

I actually like where this is heading. From the JS side this brings up the question: how do you manage the DOM that already exists? The current big frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular won't help you here because they generate new DOM, they don't manage existing DOM. There's currently one framework that does that: StimulusJS. But I hope there will be more alternatives soon. They would not only fit the JAM Stack, but also CMS generated sites very well. Custom Elements also don't work in every situation.

[mateja]

Let's say that you're BBC with thousands of articles and new ones coming in all the time. If you had a single page app you'd probably want to fetch the articles from an API instead of redeploying every time a new article is added or modified.

[rlamacraft]

I started off pretty cynical - as in it’s just Web development with the mantra of Keep-It-Simple, -Stupid right, but with the examples of when not use it and the inflection point as discussed helped clarify why it’s a very different development process to SPAs and the like. Also, can’t ever complain at anyone promoting open APIs!

[FrankTaillandier]

PWA, Serverless or JAMstack might be buzzwords, but they're important concepts that are here to stay. It's not just a trend or a hype thing, it's something that makes you think twice on your current architecture. How can you improve your front-end performance, do you have to handle your own infrastructure, what third-party specialized services could you rely on to improve your productivity or get more focused on your domain, not your servers?

[seangwright]

If an api serves content as data to a SPA, is that JAM? I would assume so. If an api serves content as data to a SPA that is a mix of data/schema/content and maybe content with embedded markup - is that still JAM? If that markup embedded content is served directly from a database->api->json response with no server HTML rendering, is that JAM?

If your page hits an Api once its in the browser, it's getting non-static data and if that non-static data is turned into UX then it's starting to feel like a headless CMS could be JAM... or not?

[TomAndrewsDeveloper]

IIRC the bbc used to use a build system to make their website and not use any server rendering. So it would have been JAM but I guess they hit the inflection point you discussed. I believe it was called the Borg but I can’t find any articles about it now.

[TheNewton]

What's next you ask? Why the JIMstack Javascript Iframes Markup. Only serve parts of the content and UI as needed with the web portal paradigm.

[HashimWarren]

Jake and Surma - you can use "incremental builds" if a site has many pages.

[shanonjackson]

Dear Jake and Surma.

Please give use updates on the state of tail call optimization in javascript it was promised in ES6 chrome still hasn't shipped it. Really want to know this feature hasn't died.

[MrZyclops]

For the future as internet connections get faster and more reliable, surely delivering an initial payload of html/js/css and then only requesting data from the server as needed is the prefered solution?

How many ms does it require to assemble and render templates client side? ... not many. I don't really understand why it's necessary to have the "templates" rendered on the server. Server Side Rendering and sending rendered templates from the server I don't think solves a particularly useful problem. Would like to hear others opinions

[WillHancock]

Partial rebuilds are tricky but doable. Only rebuild what you need to.

[franklin_waller]

Wouldn’t you need to rebuild all pages if you changed design? That would be a huge load on the build step

[m-vo]

One could still use a HTTP cache + proper cache invalidation strategy for server side rendered content I guess. At least for something like the big news site example that sounds a bit more reasonable to me. :-) Interesting approach nevertheless.