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Jamstacked Issue 59

Open source and monetization in the Jam world.

Published: Jul 7, 2022

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​59 — July 7, 2022
✦ web version

An interesting trend over the past few years has been how many of the popular static site generators and frameworks we rely on are tied to a company that aims to monetize usage of that tool (to be clear, I am not judging this – just noting its rise). In Jamstack, I feel this initially started with Gatsby but nowadays includes Next.js, Astro, Remix and Fresh. While the framework is open source, the monetization is often tied to services that deeply integrate with framework features on day one.

While they aren't owned by a company, tools like Eleventy and SvelteKit (part of Svelte) have development fully funded by Netlify and Vercel respectively. It's worth noting that this model differs significantly as, in practice, features of each are not tied to specific offerings from the service that funds them.

— Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's good

Next.js 12.2
The latest version of the extremely popular React-based framework brings middleware and on-demand ISR out of an experimental phase and into stable. It also adds new edge capabilities in edge API routes and edge SSR, which are both still in the experimental phase. To make all this work, Vercel announced their edge middleware service is now generally available and edge functions are now in public beta.

Vercel

Demystifying the New Gatsby Framework
Gatsby 4 came out in October 2021 with a lot of new features. This post digs into the major ones like deferred static generation, server-side rendering and build time optimizations. It also looks at how this integrates with Gatsby Cloud, and briefly how Gatsby 4 stacks up against Next.js.

Juan Diego Rodríguez

Deno's Fresh Uses Server-Side Rendering for Faster Apps
This takes a deeper look into Fresh (the new SSR-focused application framework for and by Deno), discussing it with Deno software engineer Luca Casonato. He notes a key differentiator is that Fresh is designed for running on the edge.

Loraine Lawson

✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...

  • Capri – A new SSG that features an islands architecture and the ability to use your framework of choice as well as instant headless CMS previews with a number of pre-built CMS integrations.
  • Cut Build Times with Gatsby Runner – Matt Kane discusses his work on a new, experimental Gatsby Runner that has reduced build times by 84% and cuts total deploy time by 62% in his tests.
  • Dev Chats - Jammin' with the JamStack – The Stripe team talks to Charlie Gerard about what the Jamstack is and why it matters.
  • You Should Add a Generator Tag to your Eleventy Site – Eleventy does not add a generator meta tag by default but David Darnes suggests you add one.
  • Jamstack Community Survey – Your chance to participate in the yearly survey of Jamstack developers.

❖ Tidbits

Pre-Rendering and Data Fetching Strategies in Next.js
A good introduction to rendering options in Next.js, especially static rendering and ISR, and how to fetch data for them. I quibble with putting SSR under pre-rendering but it’s not central to the article.

Ifeoma Imoh

One of My Favorite Performance-Boosting Netlify Plugins
Sean extolls the benefits of inlining critical CSS and how a Netlify build plugin can solve this for you with no effort. Raymond Camden also explored the Netlify cache plugin using Eleventy this week.

Sean C. Davis

Developing a Web Application with Netlify Serverless Functions and MongoDB
A step-by-step guide to build and deploy a web app that uses Netlify functions to get data from MongoDB Atlas.

Nic Raboy

Related Content by Day of Year in Eleventy
Ray shows how to display a list of related content based upon the date the content was published (“On this day in…”).

Raymond Camden

Thanks for reading. Catch you next time. — Brian