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Jamstacked Issue 44

More like Jam...packed

Published: Dec 2, 2021

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​44 — December 2, 2021
✦ web version

To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges (aka Steve McCroskey) in Airplane!, I picked the wrong week to take a Jamstacked break. The past few weeks have been a non-stop parade of major announcements that show the the Jamstack space is as white hot as ever.

First, Netlify announced their series D round along with an acquisition and Jamstack Fund. Not to be outdone, Vercel announced their series C round. In addition, Cloudflare had some major releases around their Full Stack Week and Limelight acquired Layer0. Phew!

— Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's Good

Netlify Raises $105 Million to Transform Development for the Modern Web
Netlify made a lot of announcements along with their funding including the acquisition of OneGraph, a consolidated GraphQL API provider (see The Register's coverage of the acquisition), and a $10 million Jamstack Innovation Fund.

Netlify

Vercel's $102M to Continue Building the Next Web, Together
Vercel’s future is unsurprisingly tied to Next.js. They cite a “50% increase in Next.js downloads on npm, from 4.1M to 6.2M, and the number of homepages using Next.js in the Alexa top 10,000 has grown 50%”.

Vercel

Cloudflare Pages Goes Full Stack
Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers have both been available for a while, but you previously had to build and integrate each separately. This update means you can build and deploy them together.

Shah, Maddern, Saffary

Limelight Networks Completes Acquisition of Layer0
Limelight is a CDN provider and they have acquired Layer0, a platform for building and deploying Jamstack sites that leverage edge functions and rendering.

Limelight

✂︎ Tools and Resources

  • Strapi v4 – The latest version of this headless CMS includes easier plugins, better API performance, a new look, improved database query engine and more.
  • API Authentication on Netlify – As part of the OneGraph acquisition, Netlify announced API authentication support for Stripe, GitHub, Spotify and Salesforce, which allows you to skip a lot of boilerplate authentication code.
  • The Eleventy API Explorer – Explore services in the Eleventy API ecosystem including screenshots, sparklines, avatars and images.
  • Dynamically choosing a data file to use in Eleventy templates – A solution to a tricky problem using a custom filter
  • adapter-cloudflare – Svelte Adapter for building SvelteKit applications on Cloudflare Pages with Workers integration.
  • md-block – A Markdown renderer built in JavaScript that has some features and configuration options that differ from existing solutions.

❖ Tidbits

Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages vs AWS Amplify
This looks at ease of use, using custom domains, build time and time to first byte to compare the three services. In the author’s opinion, each has its strengths.

Wan Chun Chen

Dynamic by Default: Shopify's Hydrogen, a New Take on React
Hydrogen is not a Jamstack framework as it is “dynamic by default” but this article talks about how it differs from a traditional Jamstack approach and, specifically, Next.js.

Richard MacManus

Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? ("Transitional Apps")
A quick take on thought provoking (and perhaps controversial) talk from Rich Harris (who recently joined Vercel) at the most recent Jamstack Conf.

Chris Coyier

Thank you for reading. I'll catch you next time — Brian