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Jamstacked Issue 45

A year of big changes for Jamstack devs

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​45 — December 16, 2021
✦ web version

It's hard to believe, but this is already our last issue of the year (I'll be back on Jan 6th). It was a year of big changes for Jamstack developers — it felt as though each week we learned about new tools, services and technologies (for example, we jumped two major versions of Next.js this year alone).

Some of these things, like deferred rendering, edge functions, the islands architecture (see Astro or Slinkity) could dramatically change the way Jamstack sites are built – so much so that we seemed to spend too much of the year debating what Jamstack means (again).

These are exciting times to be a Jamstack developer for sure. I look forward to helping you all navigate this ever-changing landscape in 2022!

Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's Good

Jamstack in 2021 from The Web Almanac
There’s a lot of data and information to digest here, even if there are a ton of caveats. Some of the issues surround the inability of the data set to determine the usage of all frameworks (Eleventy, for example) or to determine whether a site using Next/Nuxt is SSR. Still, the adoption data shows interesting positive trends for Jamstack, while the user experience and performance scores were discouraging. I shared more thoughts here.

Artem Denysov

Understanding Rendering in the Jamstack
Once upon a time, Jamstack was just about static rendering. Now, with SSR, ISR/DPR/DSG and edge rendering, things have gotten a bit complicated and potentially confusing. I try to help make sense of it all in this article.

Brian Rinaldi

Eleventy 1.0 - The Serverless Plugin
Eleventy Serverless is a new plugin that supports SSR pages on Eleventy sites. Ray explains how this works and shows how you can build one.

Raymond Camden

What is Partial Hydration and Why Is Everyone Talking About It?
An extensive summary of the concepts behind partial rehydration and the “islands architecture” as well as what tools and frameworks support it.

Anthony Campolo

Inertia
Some thoughts about how tools like Astro are changing the game a bit by taking a user-facing tool (React) and making it developer-facing by compiling everything during the build. Want to learn to use Astro? Check out Jaden Baptista's or Rodney Lab's new tutorials.

Chris Coyier

✂︎ Tools and Resources

  • TheJam.dev 2022 – This Jamstack conference that I run will be back on January 26-27, 2022 and already has a great list of speakers announced.
  • On-Demand Builders are now Generally Available – On-demand Builders are serverless functions to generate content. They are now out of beta with new support for time to live (TTL) cache expiration.
  • Strapi Conf Call for Papers – The next Strapi Conf is on March 16. You can apply to speak right now.
  • Vercel Acquires Turborepo – Turborepo is a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript codebases.

❖ Tidbits

Top 5 Internet Technologies of 2021
Four out of the five technologies are focused on the web, which is actually somewhat surprising, with the Jamstack being represented by Next.js 12. It notes new features like middleware and instant HMR. There are some caveats around React, noting the pushback on the amount of JavaScript that React tends to send that can negatively impact performance.

Richard MacManus

Next.js on Netlify: Latest Update Introduces Complete Support for ISR, Now with Revalidate
This is an interesting development because, as I always understood it, Netlify proposed Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR) due to philosophical differences over ISRs revalidate option. Revalidation is now fully supported on Netlify. Previously, ISR with revalidate would behave like SSR when deployed to Netlify.

Netlify

Optimizing Build Times in Jamstack—Netlify’s DPR & Next.js
A look at how to implement deferred rendering using Next.js and what you need to deploy a site using deferred rendering on Netlify.

Ifeoma Imoh

WordPress in the World of Headless, Jamstack and Decoupled Sites
How does headless Wordpress fit into the Jamstack ecosystem and what are the pros and cons? As CEO of Strattic, Miriam has some stake in the answers, but I found her list of cons in this 'part two' (particularly the one about turning Wordpress into a “meh CMS”) hit the mark.

Miriam Schwab

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