JAMstack: A Quick Breakdown

What is JAMstack?

If you are new to website development, you might want to know what this is actually. Let us help you understand it better.

JAMstack is a modern web development architecture.

Is it a programming language? No.

Is it any form of development tool? No.

JAMstack is a simple web development practice aiming toward enforcing better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and of course, better developer experience.

JAMstack is a modern website architecture based on Java, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markups (we shall see all of these constraints in detail later). In simple words, it is an architecture designed to run your web faster, more secure, and easier to scale. This is done with the help of pre-rendering and decoupling. The Frontend of JAMstack is highly optimized and it is pre-built and pre-rendered at build time. You shall find a couple of tools for generating websites such as Gatsby, Eleventy, and so on.

The pages are delivered through CDN and there is no need for the traditional dynamic web server. This also makes the website fast, cost-efficient, and highly scalable.

JAMstack is not about any specific technologies for building websites, it is just a new way of doing it all. Build websites and apps with JAMstack to deliver better performance.

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Benefits of using JAMstack

1. Performance:

In the modern age, a user’s attention span is short. In case your web page’s performance is lagging by a bit, it can cause losing the user. When we use JAMstack websites, it is not a problem. The main reason is that these sites are static hosting on CDN, and thus, they are super-fast.

Additionally, JAMstack sites do not require the server to generate the site on request because the site is pre-generated in build time. This feature helps us get super good performance without any need for complex, expensive, and massive server infrastructure.

2. Security:

With e-commerce or other websites, security is always a concern. The benefit of having JAMstack websites is that they offer a small attack surface. As the page assets are based on pre-generated files, this further allows just a read-only hosting thereby reducing the attack surface more.

3. Scale:

When there is more traffic on the website, you can easily increase CDN volume to manage the new traffic. So, even with huge traffic spikes, your JAMstack sites do not slow down. Also, there is no need to add any caching logic for popular assets and views.

4. Maintainability:

As JAMstack websites are hosted with the help of CDN, you do not have any site maintenance tasks. The entire work is done in build time and once the site is built you serve the site from a CDN, there is no need for any backend servers to update anything.

5. Portability:

JAMstack uses pre-generated sites and thus, they are pretty easy to handle. With JAMstack sites, you can use any kind of static hosting solution to host the site.

When you want to create a JAMstack website, the developer must have a top-notch experience. JAMstack makes everything pretty fast and nimble for the user and the user can also use a wide variety of popular modern tools and frameworks.

Why use JAMstack architecture?

Many developers still argue to go by the traditional approach to develop a website but JAMstack is better than any other conventional approach because your website development will go as serverless as possible with JAMstack. This means you remove redundancy from your system and pay attention to your clients, which brings lesser service requests and better performance.

With JAMstack, you focus on a different tech stack level; the level that is the real constraint on a project. The primary constraints in JAMstack are:

• It is the universal runtime layer in the browser for extra functionality and dynamic behavior.
• They replace the databases and fetch everything that is needed directly from the services required.
• Markup serves the actual website content and HTML required.

Best Practices to JAMstack

• Say no to servers and use CDN to distribute your files.
• Contributing and installing to your project should be easy and less complex. To ensure faster setup, users can use tools such as npm and git.
• You must ensure that your project is up to the web standards and highly accessible.
• The build process should be automatic.
• Platforms like Netlify help to deploy your automatic process easily.

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Final Word

There is no denying that JAMstack is faster, highly secured, and easier to scale as your project moves ahead. JAMstack websites do not contain heavy files at the back end, and they have fewer files of small sizes. JAMstack is a robust and modern web architecture shaping the future of the web.