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The Evolution of Jamstack

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Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#21

Post by asien »

yannoninator wrote: post #17
0xb0565e487 wrote: post #13

I've been working for a company that heavily caters toward the "JAMStack ecosystem" for a while now. From my point of view, the "JAMStack" is nothing more than a piece of jargon used to aggregate various "good" ways of building and deploying web applications to trick non-technical business people or entry-level developers into using their services. There's an absurd amount of money and effort currently being spent ma…

Hmm, so basically you're saying it's a scam right?

I wouldn’t call it a « scam » technically.

But remember GWT ? I work in one Europe largest bank , the majority of internal apps are written in GWT.

In the 2010 era this trend was at its peak.[0]

Some members of the teams decided that they should « invest » in GWT because this would be the future.

Here we are 10 years laters , GWT is a deprecated legacy framework and developers have been burned out by this strategy.

For Jamstack the same will happen , the hype is reaching its peak and is going to come down as developers and businesses realize it doesn’t actually solve anything from their actual problems.

But in the process, people who are selling « Jamstack » books probably made a fortune. Same thing for GWT...

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#22

Post by jmconfuzeus »

gherkinnn wrote: post #18
jmconfuzeus wrote: post #9

Jamstack sounds good on paper but it causes too much trouble for marketing people. The role of a website is to do marketing and if your marketing people can't easily work with it then it's a failure of a website.

Of all the valid criticisms of JAM, this isn’t one. Not every website is in the hands of marketing people and even if it were so, any CMS can be used. No need to teach anybody how to use Git.

Not just Git, marketing people also hate headless CMSes because they're hard to use and make it more complicated to try new things out. You have to use different tools to build forms, pages, and track users. Even as a developer I think it's a nightmare.

They best way to build a website is by using something like Elementor or Webflow so that engineers can spend time building useful things instead of reinventing the wheel.

Block based CMSes like Wagtail are also very good because unlike page builders, you get good performance. Of course, there will be additional development costs.

In the end, it's very important to not require development time for every little experiment your marketing team needs to carry out and with Jamstack you always need to bother your developer when you need to make a change.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#23

Post by jeffreyrogers »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #16
0xb0565e487 wrote: post #13

I've been working for a company that heavily caters toward the "JAMStack ecosystem" for a while now. From my point of view, the "JAMStack" is nothing more than a piece of jargon used to aggregate various "good" ways of building and deploying web applications to trick non-technical business people or entry-level developers into using their services. There's an absurd amount of money and effort currently being spent ma…

This is also true for basically all "cloud" services. There's no real innovation, just a return to mainframes and timesharing with a massive amount of marketing momentum to convince everyone that this is a step forwards. But hey, we all drank the Kool-Aid.

Maybe there's no technological innovation, but they do make things a lot easier. I set up my own email server once (for sending mail from a webapp) and after doing that once I'm happy to use mailgun from now on (it is non trivial to configure a mail server to deliver mail to all major email providers without getting flagged as spam).

Sometimes avoiding the cloud services is the right decision, and I think many architectures are overly complicated based on current and prospective performance requirements (cargo cult infrastructure/architecture), but used properly they save many thousands of hours of engineering time.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#24

Post by game_the0ry »

0xb0565e487 wrote: post #13

I've been working for a company that heavily caters toward the "JAMStack ecosystem" for a while now. From my point of view, the "JAMStack" is nothing more than a piece of jargon used to aggregate various "good" ways of building and deploying web applications to trick non-technical business people or entry-level developers into using their services. There's an absurd amount of money and effort currently being spent ma…

I tend to agree. Rise of JAMStack as a concept is likely backed by companies like Netlify, Vercel, Auth0, Twilio, Firebase, and very other API-as-a-service company.

Though I think its part natural evolution of how web apps are built - it makes sense that common web apps functionality (like auth, database, email, etc) would be commoditized as services. I don't see that as a bad thing, especially since there is a lot of open source software (RoR, Django) that commoditizes and standardizes those aspects anyway.

JAMStack also has the side benefit of encouraging developers to focus on the business value of the software they are building, rather than the underlying plumbing.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#25

Post by pudmaidai »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #16
0xb0565e487 wrote: post #13

I've been working for a company that heavily caters toward the "JAMStack ecosystem" for a while now. From my point of view, the "JAMStack" is nothing more than a piece of jargon used to aggregate various "good" ways of building and deploying web applications to trick non-technical business people or entry-level developers into using their services. There's an absurd amount of money and effort currently being spent ma…

This is also true for basically all "cloud" services. There's no real innovation, just a return to mainframes and timesharing with a massive amount of marketing momentum to convince everyone that this is a step forwards. But hey, we all drank the Kool-Aid.

Yeah, ok, maybe you’re glossing over the immense difference that there is between what could be done on a mainframe vs what a Lambda allows, including all complementary services like per-second billing and granular permissions and logging. Now tell me that this is just the same thing as “mainframes” from the 80s.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#26

Post by pudmaidai »

asien wrote: post #21
yannoninator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, so basically you're saying it's a scam right?

I wouldn’t call it a « scam » technically. But remember GWT ? I work in one Europe largest bank , the majority of internal apps are written in GWT. In the 2010 era this trend was at its peak.[0] Some members of the teams decided that they should « invest » in GWT because this would be the future. Here we are 10 years laters , GWT is a deprecated legacy framework and developers have been burned out by this strategy. F…

What’s your point? Technologies come and go. People built Ruby apps that did their job and now good luck finding maintainers for them. It’s just how our market works. We’re lucky if our stack lasts 10 years.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#27

Post by enahs-sf »

I know when I used next.js, vercel was collecting telemetry. Would be interesting for them to publish some of that data. I’d love to know the median compile time of next.js apps. On the app I worked on it was pretty slow. Like go get a coffee and come back slow.

Eventually I just got fed up and now wrote my subsequent react app from scratch.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#28

Post by sethherr »

pudmaidai wrote: post #26
asien wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t call it a « scam » technically. But remember GWT ? I work in one Europe largest bank , the majority of internal apps are written in GWT. In the 2010 era this trend was at its peak.[0] Some members of the teams decided that they should « invest » in GWT because this would be the future. Here we are 10 years laters , GWT is a deprecated legacy framework and developers have been burned out by this strategy. F…

What’s your point? Technologies come and go. People built Ruby apps that did their job and now good luck finding maintainers for them. It’s just how our market works. We’re lucky if our stack lasts 10 years.

Ruby is still alive and well! It’s still focused on functionality over flash, and it’s not hard to find developers for it.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#29

Post by PinkPigeon »

jmconfuzeus wrote: post #22
gherkinnn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the valid criticisms of JAM, this isn’t one. Not every website is in the hands of marketing people and even if it were so, any CMS can be used. No need to teach anybody how to use Git.

Not just Git, marketing people also hate headless CMSes because they're hard to use and make it more complicated to try new things out. You have to use different tools to build forms, pages, and track users. Even as a developer I think it's a nightmare. They best way to build a website is by using something like Elementor or Webflow so that engineers can spend time building useful things instead of reinventing the wh…

Well, funnily enough, I have also found existing site builders to be insufficient in various ways.

Firstly, I do not believe that the block-based approach works that well. It sounds great on paper, to be able to drag and drop block-like elements to compose a page, but it falls apart so quickly. You just don't end up with coherent pages, especially once everything starts getting rearranged on mobile.

Speaking of mobile, try using one of those drag and drop based editors on a mobile phone.

Plus, performance is usually terrible and getting your preview can also take a while. Not sure if they do shareable preview pages nowadays.

I build a CMS for static pages (not sure it's considered jamstack?) addressing all of the above, which deploys straight to Cloudflare, handles your forms and is based on modules, not blocks. Everything is a module, basically. This has allowed us to create sites that are properly responsive AND a CMS that works properly on smartphones. The tricky part is competing in a market where everyone thinks Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace are the last word spoken (when that couldn't be further from the truth, there is so much to be improved upon). We're also competing on price, depending on what features users need.

Don't know if anyone here is interested in trying it, but if you hit me up, I'll sort you out with a discount.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#30

Post by PinkPigeon »

yannoninator wrote: post #11

so many questions about this: how does the database fit into this? how does the 'Jamstack' compare to Wordpress or it doesn't? how does content get edited in the 'Jamstack' like Wordpress? how is the 'Jamstack' 'mainstream'? compared to what? why do I have to use Git to use the 'Jamstack'?

I can at least answer this for my 'Jamstack' product (I think it might be accidentally 'Jamstack', as I only recently found out that this refers to static pages with no DB etc).

I wanted to just have a sensible frontend for Hugo, with easily reusable components that are not React, etc.

So, your questions:

> how does the database fit into this?

The only DB we have is our own CMS, so that's keeping your user details and your site details. That's it. The websites the CMS produces go straight to Cloudflare as static sites. The files sit on our server and are manipulated directly from within the CMS.

> how does the 'Jamstack' compare to Wordpress or it doesn't?

We don't have themes, or drag and drop block-based editing. We use modules (basically components) that combine different ways of displaying text / imagery / video and can be stacked vertically into a static website. All of this runs a lot faster, as we don't have a super complex react frontend with a million loc of JS, but rather just some vanilla js sprinkled in here and there to keep things a bit dynamic. Also works really well on mobile, which Wordpress doesn't do all that well I don't think. Makes it a lot easier to represent site structure visually imo

> how does content get edited in the 'Jamstack' like Wordpress?

A bunch of json files / go html templates fed into Hugo, which compiles a static site. These json files are of course represented in a very visually appealing (I hope at least) way. The whole point of the CMS is to keep all technical concerns far, far away from users.

> how is the 'Jamstack' 'mainstream'? compared to what?

I am not sure it is. Everyone I've so far spoken to is only aware of Squarespace, Wordpress (they claim they're 40% of the web), Wix, or the site builders that come with 123reg or Godaddy. And almost nobody seems to like them, which is a real shame. I think that entire sector has failed to enable laypeople to make websites. I hope to somehow be able to rectify that.

> why do I have to use Git to use the 'Jamstack'?

I think it's for CI (continuous integration) convenience. The problem is that only developers understand how this works. We actually started out deploying to Netlify via git, but the process was too slow and brittle (often webhooks wouldn't work). Thus, we just deploy static sites directly to Cloudflare workers sites. No git involved. Netlify also supports .zip file deployments FWIW.

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