Jamstack Explained

Jamstack is no longer a buzzword over which dev keyword warriors brawl. It has grown to become a booming ecosystem of tools helping developers ship performant websites, progressive web apps, and other projects with benefits too good to ignore.

Big names are jumping into the Jamstack space as well. For example, Microsoft launched Azure Static Web Apps earlier this year, and Cloudflare just recently released something similar, Cloudflare pages. Finally, it gets the attention of commercially popular brands such as PayPal, Nike, Braun, Shopify, FreeCodeCamp to name a few.

All the fuss and the commotion in the dev world right now around the use or no use of Jamstack or WordPress put many in a blind spot, often forgetting the end-users, the businesses, and their audience.

For us at Bejamas, Jamstack has always been a huge step forward in making websites and web apps for our clients with a vast array of benefits. It was like that ever since we started. But it is not always the choice since the stack we’ll be using depends on the project at hand.

With that in mind, this post here aims to explain the main idea behind Jamstack, how it differs from traditional stacks, why and when it is a better solution for web developers and clients.

What is Jamstack?

JAMstack is a handy abbreviation coined by Mathias Biilmann, the CEO of Netlify, and it stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. But what it refers to today (or what it means) is much more than what it stands for.

Today Jamstack refers to a web development architecture that allows developers to rely on a static website’s advantages, including better web performance and security benefits, while still retaining the dynamic attributes of a database-oriented CMS without the database.

The Jamstack approach enables you to create fully dynamic sites while the real assets are pre-rendered static files deployed on CDN. The dynamic side of things is handled with client-side JavaScript, usually run through serverless functions.

To present this in context, let’s compare the reigning champion of web development, LAMP stack process, with the challenger, Jamstack.