Modern Web Development on the JAMstack

Introduction

In just the past few years, a flurry of advancements has greatly strengthened the web as a content and application platform. Browsers are much more powerful. JavaScript has matured. WebAssembly is on the horizon. It certainly feels like the beginning of a new chapter for the web. You’ve likely felt this as you’ve witnessed the explosion of new frontend frameworks and API-based services.

Although what’s technically possible in the browser has advanced, so too have expectations for immediacy. Videos must play instantly. Browser applications must launch faster than their desktop counterparts. Users have become increasingly mobile and increasingly impatient—we are all fed up with slow pages and we vote angrily against them with the back button. (Google also seems to be losing patience, and now factors site speed into its famous ranking algorithms.)

Broadly speaking, this book covers new, modern approaches to building websites that perform as fast as possible. More concretely, this book shows you how to run any web property, from simple sites to complex applications, on a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) and without a single web server. We introduce you to the JAMstack: a powerful new approach for deploying fast, highly scalable sites and applications that don’t require traditional frontend infrastructure. If you tend to feel delivering great websites should be more about the craft of markup and JavaScript than server setup and administration, you’ve found your book. ...