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Jamstacked Issue 60

A revamped definition of Jamstack

Published: Jul 21, 2022

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​60 — July 21, 2022
✦ web version

Let's explore a question that we've never explored before: what is Jamstack? 🤣 Of course I kid as we, as a community, have perhaps explored this to death lately. However, it is prescient to talk about it again since Netlify has officially revamped the definition on Jamstack.org.

The biggest change is that the definition is now the first thing you see on the site. At first glance you may not even notice any dramatic changes in the text but look closer you'll notice a primary emphasis on decoupling with no mention of pre-rendering, which was a core tenet of the prior definition (so much so, it was called out with its own subsection). I suspect the trend towards hybrid SSG/SSR or even pure SSR frameworks is driving this change in order to keep Jamstack (and the companies that identify with it) relevant as developer tools evolve.

Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's good

The Jamstack Definition Evolved
Netlify has made some updates to the official Jamstack page and definition. The definition is now up-front on the site. Some notable changes are the move from calling it an architecture to an architectural approach and the removal of references to pre-rendering and security (the latter because of the former perhaps?).

Phil Hawksworth

Jamstack defined:

“..an architectural approach that decouples the web experience layer from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability”

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Netlify's Jamstack.org

A New Pattern For The Jamstack: Segmented Rendering
“Segmented Rendering” uses static site generation on the server and redirection at the edge to serve up the proper personalized version of a page for the user. This could be a useful pattern for situations like i18n or paid content where the page is personalized for a segment rather than an individual.

Eric Burel

Introducing Pagefind: Static Low-Bandwidth Search at Scale
Pagefind is an open-source tool created by CloudCannon that generates a static index based upon your static site, but does so in a way that splits the data into optimized chunks, minimizing the network traffic necessary for the search while keeping it fast.

Liam Bigelow

Netlify Invests in 10 Startups to Promote Jamstack
Some months back, Netlify announced their $1M Jamstack Innovation Fund and they just announced the 10 recipients which are NuxtLabs, Deno, ChiselStrik, Convex, Clerk, Clutch, Everfund, Snaplet, TakeShape and Tigris Data.

Loraine Lawson

✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...

  • HugoConf Recordings – There were a ton of great sessions at HugoConf but don't worry if you missed them, all of the individual session recordings have been posted to YouTube.
  • Gatsby v4.19 – The key change in this version is the new Gatsby Head API that is replacing the use of react-helmet for adding content to the head.
  • New API backend options in Azure Static Web Apps – This allows you to create and manage your APIs using Azure's existing services but easily link those to the /api route in your application.
  • Hydrogen Projects on Vercel – Hydrogen is Shopify's React-based, full-stack SSR framework. You can now deploy them to Vercel with zero config.

❖ Tidbits

A Look At Remix And The Differences With Next.js
A good feature-by-feature comparison of the two React-based frameworks that share a ton of similarities but some key differences.

Facundo Giuliani

Prerender Angular Apps with Less Configuration
The angular-prerender project has added a new recursive flag to automatically detect dynamic routes and pre-render them with no configuration.

Christoph Guttandin

Living on the Edge: Using Vercel’s Middleware and GraphQL
How to integrate Next.js middleware (running on Vercel) in a Next.js application for rerouting at the edge.

Lucia Cerchie

Thank you for reading. Catch you next time. — Brian