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The Evolution of Jamstack

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Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#31

Post by _fat_santa »

enahs-sf wrote: post #27

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.

I found quite the opposite.

Both Next.JS and Gatsby are so so fast with HMR, I really am not sure how they achieve that with Webpack. I have a few apps that are bootstrapped with Webpack and things like hot reloading take a few seconds, with Next or Gatsby it's instant.

As far as build time I've noticed all my React apps, whether built with regular Webpack or Next, all compile in roughly the same time.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#32

Post by reitoei »

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…

You're talking about *Jamstack* like it's some kind of proprietary framework or platform.

It's a methodology for building websites in a particular way using an enormously diverse set of tools and platforms. Comparing it to GWT is not correct.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#33

Post by [deleted] »

k__ wrote: post #5
sbazerque wrote: post #2

What does he mean by pre-rendering? Do they spin-up a browser-like environment on the server and use that to render the page and cache it? Or has that idea been improved upon?

No, it's more like server side rendering with PHP or Ruby, back in the days. I wrote a bit about this topic here: https://dev.to/fllstck/where-when-should-you-render-your-htm...

[deleted]

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#34

Post by PinkPigeon »

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…

It's sort of funny to see how this has suddenly become such a big term. I started out building a CMS that deploys static sites. I did that because I didn't want to deal with DBs / Wordpress, etc. I just wanted to quickly throw static pages onto a CDN and not worry about hosting. Netlify and the likes enabled this and I thought it was rather fantastic. So easy to deploy, very little performance worries, no DB to secure etc. etc. Then the JAMStack term started showing up (pushed by Netlify initially, I believe?). And you're right, just like 'serverless' (which is a ridiculous misnomer), I think this is just the kind of thing that's needed to get non-technical people on board with a better way of doing things.

At the same time, I think there's true advantages to this approach, so long as you do things right and don't fall into the traps of paying through the nose for things that should be cheap. cough Netlify form handling.

The challenge for Netlify (and my own business as well) is finding a way to capitalise on static sites, so often they will decide on some arbitrary metric and restrict that.

So, while I think the term jamstack may go away, I feel the idea behind static sites probably won't. To be able to make a whole shop, including financial transactions, without a DB in sight is quite appealing imo.

Just don't get suckered into the walled gardens / closed ecosystems out there.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#35

Post by quesera »

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.

I agree with your larger point, but FWIW your example does not match my experience.

I've never had any special difficulties hiring Ruby/Rails devs. Quality is high, availability is reasonable (hiring is always something of a struggle!). My first Rails hire was in 2003 (rails-0.8, IIRC) and my most recent was about 6 months ago.

That's 17 years, and counting.

OTOH, I've never had a good time hiring people to maintain EOLed apps. Ruby or otherwise. "Sustaining Engineering" is a (misnamed) trade that isn't as broadly attractive as new development.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#36

Post by _fat_santa »

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…

> 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.

I strongly disagree. IMO a headless CMS is perfect because it provides a good seperation of concerns. Marketing people want to adjust taglines and tweak text, add tags and do that sort of stuff, they don't want to spend their time building interfaces. Developers want to build interfaces but don't really care to spend their time figuring out the perfect tagline or adjusting verbiage on a landing page.

With a headless CMS I can focus on creating the page, hook it up to my CMS, and then message the marketing person that the page is ready for them to add data to it.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#37

Post by hutrdvnj »

I remember the time when LAMP stack was new. Every new stack will be discussed controversial at first. Some say avoid it as hell, some say it's very good, some say who cares.

I think as time progresses this term will be less and less controversial until people use it like they would refer to the LAMP stack without further thinking.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#38

Post by jmconfuzeus »

_fat_santa wrote: post #36
jmconfuzeus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I strongly disagree. IMO a headless CMS is perfect because it provides a good seperation of concerns. Marketing people want to adjust taglines and tweak text, add t…

They don't want to build the whole interface but they sure want to move things around and try out pages with different layouts.

The goal is to allow them to ship marketing experiments as quickly as possible. With Jamstack, they always have to wait on the developer.

The only people who enjoy Jamstack are developers themselves because it's a cool toy to play with. I used to like playing around with Gatsby and Contentful 3 years ago. Then I decided that businesses need to make money and I can't be doing what I find fun to use at the detriment of the ecosystem.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#39

Post by jmconfuzeus »

PinkPigeon wrote: post #29
jmconfuzeus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mobil…

Sounds like you built something for yourself instead of building something that the market wants.

Every non technical person I've spoken with loves Wordpress and Squarespace for good reason.

Re: The Evolution of Jamstack

#40

Post by akie »

jmconfuzeus wrote: post #38
_fat_santa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I strongly disagree. IMO a headless CMS is perfect because it provides a good seperation of concerns. Marketing people want to adjust taglines and tweak text, add t…

They don't want to build the whole interface but they sure want to move things around and try out pages with different layouts. The goal is to allow them to ship marketing experiments as quickly as possible. With Jamstack, they always have to wait on the developer. The only people who enjoy Jamstack are developers themselves because it's a cool toy to play with. I used to like playing around with Gatsby and Contentfu…

Preach.
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