WHY IS JAMSTACK SO POPULAR TODAY?

Jamstack has disrupted the web development industry and has been taking the developer’s community by storm. Since the development of this web architecture pattern by Mathias Biilmann in the year 2015, developers have been enraptured by it. The fact that Jamstack is both cost and time effective, it has established itself to be quite relevant in the development community. 

So, WHAT IS JAMSTACK?

Jamstack is an architectural approach that decouples the web experience layer from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability of a website.

Jamstack removes the need for business logic to dictate the web experience. 

It enables a composable architecture for the web where custom logic and 3rd party services are consumed through APIs.

WHY IS JAMSTACK POPULAR TODAY?

 To know why exactly Jamstack is popular today, you need to know the history of web development and what went into building a website pre launch of Jamstack.

Traditionally, before the technology transformation took place, the developers were restricted. The websites were just a bunch of HTML files that then would be requested by the browser. It was the HTML that was in power of how the user viewed the website. The browser had little to almost no role to play apart from letting the users view the website. 

However, with the evolution of the internet and the changing technology, developers now have more control over what they can do and experiment with. The possibilities are not limited but abundant today. With growing possibilities, the demand and requirement of users kept rising too. They were no longer content with static content. The content had to be customized according to the needs of the users. Customized content means more servers. The invention of Javascript came to the rescue. 

The development of Javascript allowed browsers to dynamically alter a page post being loaded in the browser, consequently changing how developers could work with dynamic behavior in websites. Javascript became a more relevant and a universal runtime layer. The browser was no longer a tiny player but could handle complex tasks that altered the content on a website.

The development of Javascript, markup etc. added a lot more benefits to the development world and made developer’s work easy and fun. Now that you know the relevance of Jamstack architecture, let us see why we should use it.

WHY SHOULD ONE USE JAMSTACK?

The main characteristics of Jamstack is that the markup has to be prebuilt, i.e, the developers will have to allocate a few more minutes in the building phase of the website. This will ultimately reduce the load time of the page for the users which is exactly what the users wish for. 

We know that the user’s pain point is the page load speed. Nobody is patient enough to wait for the page to load. It needs to be quick and effective. This is what Jamstack solves to a great extent. With the prebuilt approach of Jamstack, the javascript, API’s and Markup are already built in and are served from the CDN (Content Delivery Network) eliminating the waiting period for the browser to respond. 

Since the heavy lifting is already done during the build phase, the processing time is eliminated. This is one of the major reasons why developers prefer Jamstack. One need not depend on the servers. Server load is greatly reduced and the CDN takes up the role. 

Unlike, server rendered application and SPA (Single page Application), Jamstack does not require an origin server and it solves the issues developer’s face with both server rendered and SPA. 

PROS OF JAMSTACK

Jamstack has a bunch of benefits you can reap. Some of them are as follows

• Page load speed is fast since the markup is already prebuilt.

• Since you are less reliant on your database and the server your website is secure. Safety is a plus here.

• Scaling is cheap with jamstack architecture because one need not spend on buying more servers.

• It is a developer’s favorite as it provides great developer experience.

CONS OF JAMSTACK

Everything has its downsides. Jamstack does too. 

• Not exactly content editor friendly. Since the content is served as Markup, the content editors will have to be a little technical in updating the content changes.

• Not very flexible. Updates mean coding again.

• Heavily reliant on third-party systems which may not be ideal.

• Dynamic features require more heavy lifting which can be time consuming and exhausting.

WRAPPING IT UP

Despite the detriments of Jamstack, it is still preferred and is relevant in the development industry. Being more economical in most aspects, Jamstack has made its spot in the developer’s world.

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