Modern Web Development on the JAMstack

Chapter 2. Introducing the JAMstack

What’s in a Name?

The JAMstack at its core, is simply an attempt to give a name to a set of widely used architectural practices. It gives us one word to communicate a large range of architectural decisions.

It came about in conversations between people involved in the communities around static site generators, single-page application (SPA) frameworks, build tools, and API services as we realized much of the innovation in each of these categories was connected.

An entire community grew up around the first mature generation of static site generators like Jekyll, Middleman, Metalsmith, Cactus, and Roots. Jekyll found fame as the static site generator supported natively by GitHub Pages, and others were developed in-house by agencies or startups that made them a core part of their website stack. The tools brought back a feeling of simplicity and control from the complex database-based Content Management Systems (CMSs) that they replaced.

At the same time, single-page app frameworks like Vue and React started a process of decoupling the frontend from the backend, introducing build tools like Grunt, Gulp, and later, Webpack and Babel, which all propagated the idea of a self-standing frontend with its own build pipeline and deployment process. This brought a proper software architecture to the frontend workflow and empowered frontend developers to iterate much faster on the user interface (UI) and interaction layer.

When these approaches to building ...