Jamstack Is the New Development Architecture

As websites and web applications get bigger, include more functionality, and become more dynamic, server-based architecture is increasing in complexity. Additionally, security, data and performance requirements lead to further pieces in the architecture puzzle as well as increased maintenance, updating, and upgrading. In today’s tech, features are king, and the time spent working with a complex architecture is time away from features. So what is the problem and what is the solution to combat this growing trend? After all, your company needs to focus on what is important: your business.

Simple default configurations for databases no longer meet current performance requirements. This requires a lot of action and administration (tuning, redundancies, migration in the CMS, schema adjustment, backups, patches, updates, indexing, etc.).

Without caching, performance is poor. The big challenge is to keep the cache consistent and valid across multiple servers and redundant databases. This required a whole cascade of action (database replication, content consistency, cache invalidation, etc.).

This requires a high degree of administration (back-ups, keeping security plug-ins up-to-date, etc.).

Without Content Delivery Networks (CDN), large videos and images are not readily available. These large files take time to download and the further they are away from the end-user the longer the process takes. Conventional CMSs are not designed for this, which means increased effort (keeping content in sync, versioning, etc.) and poor performance.

The issues of scaling, redundancy for servers and load balancers, development, test and production environments, firewall configuration, patches, updates, etc. are all time-consuming and costly.

The Jamstack approach (JavaScript, API, and pre- rendered HTML markup) is just a few years old. It is a new method of creating websites and applications. Content is no longer processed and generated afresh for every visitor on the server. It is generated locally in the browser as Jamstack pages. Dynamic applications can also be processed in the browser thanks to JavaScript and APIs.

The former principle of loading as much of the work as possible onto the webserver is outdated. Today’s user devices have more than enough resources to run web applications. This also includes mobile devices.

Google, Facebook, and others have developed completely new web frameworks based on JavaScript, such as the JavaScript library React, and then released them as open source. React has been the most popular and fastest-growing JavaScript framework since its first application in 2011. The use of such web frameworks creates a new development architecture, where applications are no longer tied to specific operating systems or web servers.

Modern web APIs can be integrated for any JavaScript client to implement third-party services such as business applications with access to CRM and ERP systems as well as ecommerce functionalities such as payments and subscriptions. Utilizing web APIs can eliminate the need for additional servers.

Because web functions no longer need to be managed in the server, websites can be designed around microservices. A microservice undertakes a narrowly defined task which is initiated, carried out and terminated independently of other microservices.

Jamstack relocates the logic from the server to the browser, where the pages are dynamically generated through APIs and microservices. Modern browsers can interact with many APIs using JavaScript, as well as execute complex and dynamic applications.

The tasks carried out at the backend, such as creating, managing and saving content, are separated from the presentation on a frontend device (so the architecture is headless, or decoupled). Once it has been created, content can be used for any device. The functionality taking place in the frontend and the deployment of individual APIs can now be handled in isolation.

In the Jamstack approach, the website HTML is no longer generated by traditional frontend web servers, but rather the page is preconfigured, distributed via a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and displayed in the user’s browser. All other activity takes place in the browser because the pages contain JavaScript code that access APIs and is executed after the page is rendered.