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Jamstacked Issue 65

Perception versus reality

Published: Sep 29, 2022

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​65 — September 29, 2022
✦ web version

The other day Tim Benniks asked if a PHP page with heavy CDN caching could be considered Jamstack. While I like Phil Hawksworth's answer, it left me wondering whether there is a slight disconnect between the official definition of Jamstack as an "architectural approach" and how developers think about it in practice.

I have no data to back this up, but my suspicion is that, in practice, most developers associate Jamstack with a specific subset of tools and platforms, from Hugo, Next.js or Astro to Netlify, Vercel or, perhaps, Cloudflare. It's far more tangible than answering whether my application achieves abstract architectural goals, even if those goals represent the point of the entire exercise.

— Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's good

Will Serving Real HTML Content Make A Website Faster?
Experiment time! A really good comparison of SSR performance on most of the top full stack JavaScript frameworks. Astro and Sveltekit, two of the newer generation of frameworks, come out on top in many of their measurements.

Scott Jehl

Cloudflare Birthday Week Announcements
Cloudflare like to bundle big announcements into week-long events. Relevant updates announced this week included some updates to D1, their SQL database that is designed for use on the edge with Cloudflare Workers but still in private beta, Workerd, their open source Workers runtime, and dynamic redirects.

Cloudflare

How to Use Serverless Functions with SSR
A demo and tutorial showing how to abstract and reuse the same function logic across serverless functions, server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG) within a Gatsby app.

Paul Scanlon

✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...

  • Gatsby 5 Alpha – Along with Gatsby 4.24, you can also try the Gatsby 5 alpha, which includes partial hydration. Join the discussion on Gatsby 5 here.
  • Authorizer – An open source Auth0 alternative that is database independent (as in, bring your own database).
  • Introducing Commenting on Preview Deployments – Vercel now allows you to add comments to deploy previews to enable collaboration.
  • Palpatine 1.0 –  A new, minimal static site generator built with CMake and written in C++17. Also check out SSGo, which is another new, minimal SSG but built in Go.

❖ Tidbits

'What I Learned From Automating Millions of Web Site Deploys'
Phil discusses the transition of his demo site that told time by redeploying every minute to instead use edge functions. He also discusses some lessons from the millions of redeploys of the prior version.

Phil Hawksworth

How to Build a Progress Bar Indicator in Next.js
How to build and display a progress bar indicator when changing routes in Next.js with custom CSS and third-party libraries to add animation.

David Omotayo

Building A Blog with AWS Amplify and Next.JS
A simple step-by-step overview of getting a basic blog set up on AWS using Amplify using its built in data modeling for content.

Farmin

Static Site Generator - Ranking
Obviously take this data with a grain of salt as its ranking are based upon GitHub stars or pull requests but the month-to-month ranking seems to fit well with my own expectations. Hat tip to Nebojsa for the link.

OSS Insight

Thanks for reading. — Brian