JAMstack: what is it?

So what exactly is JAMstack?

In short, Jamstack is a newer way to build websites and apps. Jamstack isn’t a tool or a product, it’s a way of working when you build a website. The idea behind Jamstack is to use modern tools to generate a static website with dynamic components. A key part of this is automating as many steps of the process as possible, so they can run with every update of your website. The end result is a nice static website with dynamic components. The ‘JAM’ in Jamstack stands for: JavaScript, APIs and Markup.

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a widely used programming language for adding interactive features and other dynamic content to web pages, think slideshows and animations. Every browser supports JavaScript.

What are APIs?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s a software interface that lets two applications talk to each other. Simply put, thanks to an API you don’t need to know how an application works to communicate with it!

What is Markup?

Markup is served on websites as a static HTML file. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is, as the name suggests, a markup language. Markup gives a website its structure. It doesn’t provide the content on the site, though. That content comes from somewhere else.

What makes Jamstack so interesting?

People used to work with traditional, coupled CMS systems like WordPress or Drupal. They made it easier for clients to manage their own website. These kinds of websites rely heavily on servers, plugins and databases. Jamstack doesn’t. Working with a traditional CMS has its pros and cons. One downside is that maintenance is often clunky and slow.

What makes Jamstack so interesting is that it offers an alternative to the traditional way of building websites. Jamstack can load JavaScript that gets its data from an API, serve files from a CDN and generate markup with a static site generator. All of this happens at deploy time.

Among other things, Jamstack makes your website load and run faster. Jamstack websites have minimal load times, because the HTML is generated at deploy time and served straight from a CDN, without any interference or delays in the backend. Jamstack is also well secured. Everything runs through an API, so there are no database or security leaks. Finally, Jamstack is cheaper and easier to scale. Jamstack websites consist of just a few small files that can be served anywhere.

Take our client Nachtlab, for example. We built their entire website, using Jamstack!