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List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

jamstackfns.com

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

#11
post #2

Creator here, happy to answer any questions. Here's why I built this. JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is fundamentally reshaping the web. Coined by Netlify's co-founder, JAMstack bridges the gap between static and dynamic websites. Capitalize on static site performance, security, and scalability while still having dynamic data. I've seen this first-hand, building many JAMstacks sites myself. As a front-end de…

JAMstack is an odd term. LAMP is a stack. It's Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. JAM at most is a kind of stack, and a vague one. When using JavaScript to build web apps it's assumed markup will be involved. Perhaps including "Markup" implies SSR? I don't get it. JAM is a fun word though. Maybe that's why it took off, just like AJAX.

I do like Vercel, though.

Re: List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

#13
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is fundamentally reshaping the web. How? "fundamentally reshaping the web" is a bold claim; how are those things reshaping the Web -- what's changing shape?

Static sites have evolved. Today, they can handle real-time requests, process payments, manage customer accounts, and a lot more. Some other benefits: * Cheaper – Not making requests to the server on-demand * Faster – Served from a global CDN close to your users * Easier – No complicated deployments, better DX How is this reshaping the web? In a way, we've come full circle. What's changing is how we get to a static s…

>> Easier – No complicated deployments, better DX

I'm a big fan in many use-cases, but this one is overstated IMO. Yes, your "site" is essentially a bunch of static pages but in order to do all that fancy stuff that the JA-part is selling you now have a massive deployment challenge that's just as prone to the same problems as the distributed monolith.

The big win IMO is moving runtime concerns to build-time. There are a surprising number of scenarios where the backing data changes on predictable, not-that-frequent basis. For example, it is far easier to publish a product catalog based on some internal system via a static generator than some sort of real-time link.

There are lots of cool use-cases but JAM is not reshaping the web in any structural way, at least if you've been programming it for more than 5-10 years...

Re: List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

#16

This is pretty cool. It's about the same concept as https://stdlib.com/ but using JAMstack providers to build the serverless functions instead of dealing with the complexity of the major cloud providers and supporting different programming languages.

Thanks for sharing stdlib, I hadn't seen it before.

Netlify Functions are essentially AWS Lambda functions. They just abstract away all the tedious parts for you. Serverless functions with Next.js & Vercel have an abstraction with (req, res) to support multi-cloud.

Re: List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

#17
post #2

Creator here, happy to answer any questions. Here's why I built this. JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is fundamentally reshaping the web. Coined by Netlify's co-founder, JAMstack bridges the gap between static and dynamic websites. Capitalize on static site performance, security, and scalability while still having dynamic data. I've seen this first-hand, building many JAMstacks sites myself. As a front-end de…

JAMstack is an odd term. LAMP is a stack. It's Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. JAM at most is a kind of stack, and a vague one. When using JavaScript to build web apps it's assumed markup will be involved. Perhaps including "Markup" implies SSR? I don't get it. JAM is a fun word though. Maybe that's why it took off, just like AJAX. I do like Vercel, though.

I say JAMstack because saying "static sites" causes a lot of confusion. It's easy to hear static and think vanilla HTML with no backing data source. JAMstack, to me, is a better explanation for a static site generated by dynamic data.

Re: List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

#18
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Static sites have evolved. Today, they can handle real-time requests, process payments, manage customer accounts, and a lot more. Some other benefits: * Cheaper – Not making requests to the server on-demand * Faster – Served from a global CDN close to your users * Easier – No complicated deployments, better DX How is this reshaping the web? In a way, we've come full circle. What's changing is how we get to a static s…

>> Easier – No complicated deployments, better DX I'm a big fan in many use-cases, but this one is overstated IMO. Yes, your "site" is essentially a bunch of static pages but in order to do all that fancy stuff that the JA-part is selling you now have a massive deployment challenge that's just as prone to the same problems as the distributed monolith. The big win IMO is moving runtime concerns to build-time. There ar…

Fair points – "reshaping the web" was a probably bit overzealous.

Re: List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

#19
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is fundamentally reshaping the web. How? "fundamentally reshaping the web" is a bold claim; how are those things reshaping the Web -- what's changing shape?

Static sites have evolved. Today, they can handle real-time requests, process payments, manage customer accounts, and a lot more. Some other benefits: * Cheaper – Not making requests to the server on-demand * Faster – Served from a global CDN close to your users * Easier – No complicated deployments, better DX How is this reshaping the web? In a way, we've come full circle. What's changing is how we get to a static s…

I'm still not quite there.

>real-time requests

What's this mean? If you're describing the ability to transfer the web site's data whenever a request comes in for that data, that's been the case since day 1. Alternatively, if you're describing the ability to make changes on the fly and re-draw the web site without a full request/response cycle, is it still a static web site?

>process payments

This really doesn't count though, does it? After all, the processing is occurring elsewhere: a third-party payment service or somewhere within the infrastructure behind the web site. It's more-or-less sending a request to some place else to process a transaction.

>manage customer accounts

This is similar to the previous. There's not a whole lot new going on here; you'll have to expand.

>Cheaper – Not making requests to the server on-demand

I don't understand how not making a request is intrinsic to any type of web site.

>Faster – Served from a global CDN close to your users

This just describes the location of the data; nothing to do with the web site.

>Easier – No complicated deployments, better DX

Now this might have some merit to it. Over the course of time, technology evolves and tasks which were more complex 10 years ago may seem trivial today; the technology you're describing could indeed be one of the choices available today.

>How is this reshaping the web? In a way, we've come full circle. What's changing is how we get to a static site. JAMstack unlocks all the benefits of static sites with today's complex data requirements.

Come full circle to what?

We also haven't changed how we get to a static web site; a client calls a server and the server might respond with some data. I would navigate to your website the same exact way I would have 10, 15, ... years ago.

Re: List of Serverless Functions for JAMstack Apps

#20
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So these are frameworks that generate static sites?

Yes.

They seem nice, however I don't know of many projects I've worked on where you could do this. Usually state is mutable. One that might apply had around 20 million pages, but it still ran on two m2.micros just fine and was dynamic.
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