What is Jamstack?

If you are learning web development, you may have heard this term before. The term Jamstack was first coined by Mathias Biilmann, CEO of Netlify in 2015.

JAM stands for JavaScript, Api's, and markup. It was a revolutionary new approach to building websites. This approach is not a framework, but is actually an architectural guideline using many of the tools and skills that developers were already familiar with.

Since it's conception, it has only grown in popularity and is now an important part of a web developers toolbelt.

Why is it used?

Jamstack has many benefits and advantages that set it apart from other techniques.

It offers better performance, security, scalability,
maintainability, and ease of developer experience.

Developers can build faster with less complications, and can focus more on user experience. Businesses can then be more agile in competitive markets, and make their customers more satisfied. End users get better content that is delivered faster.

Its a win-win for end users, developers, and businesses.

How does Jamstack work?

Jamstack offers better performance by pre-rendering pages and content on build, as opposed to each time a user visits a webpage.

Pre-rendering is typically done as static pages at build time
over a content delivery network (CDN).

Once an image, video, or other content is loaded for the first
time it will then load faster when the user visits the same
website again.

Security is stronger because it has less points, or vectors, of potential weakness. It lives on fewer servers and databases which are frequently targeted.

It is more scalable because the webpage's content can be cached in a content delivery network. Unexpected heavy traffic can be handled much easier and this means less down time.

Maintaining the systems is also easier through the use of a CDN. There is less complexity and therefore, fewer areas that can fail.

Most aspects have to work at build time, so by the time a webpage is live, it has already been tested.