Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

How is this different from a single page app?

The article is also loaded with BS:

> Faster performance. Serve pre-built markup and assets over a CDN

Just like every single-page app.

> More secure. No need to worry about server or database vulnerabilities

Total BS. A form post is an API call by another name. Your server and database are just as vulnerable via an API.

> Less expensive. Hosting of static files are cheap or even free

Just like every single-page app.

> Better developer experience. Front end developers can focus on the front end, without being tied to a monolithic architecture. This usually means quicker and more focused development

Really? And templating languages do not exist on the backend? The only difference is where the processing occurs, and a single-page app has just as much templating whether the template is rendered in-browser or on-server. Often it has a lot more.

> Scalability. If your product suddenly goes viral and has many active users, the CDN seamlessly compensates

Ahem! API?

25 days ago I made this comment: "The key is to invent a new term for an existing entity. Here the author tries to introduce the term "document site" for static websites."

The same happens here. Take an existing concept. Stick a new label-term on it. Market it like you're the inventor of this revolutionary concept to the unaware. Profit.

If you're trying to sell plain ol' websites to management who are obsessed with flavour-of-the-month frameworks, a slick website promoting the benefits of "JAMstack" is a really useful thing.

Ironically, "documents" are what the original web elders called the things at the end of links.

The term is probably not great for reasons mentioned here, but the concept is nifty.

It makes tricks like React pages rendering without javascript possible, and works with pretty much any language that can manipulate strings (awk, sed & curl build process, why not).

If your api is only used during the build step, scaling is really easy like tfa mentions.

It's amazing how much easier everything gets when you define all the hard parts as somebody else's problem.

SPAs can be JAMstack or non-JAMstack. JAM is secure as fuck when there's no 'A' or when you trust the 'A' strongly. (e.g. Google Maps API) Otherwise, you're just making security someone else's problem.

You miss "The modern web revolution starts" from the 2017 block on the page.

You seem to confuse things. JAMstack doesn't try to replace SPAs, it's trying to replace Wordpress. It's simply a better choice for websites and blogs than either SPA or Wordpress. It really is a different concept than SPA.

In pure JAMstack, APIs are used only at the build step, and you don't have to expose them. You get your content such as blog posts from the API, render them to html and store on CDN.

Monolithic architecture refers mostly to Wordpress. With JAMstack you separate your CMS from your frontend, and you can manage your content with a service like https://www.contentful.com/ that doesn't define how the content gets rendered.

LOL

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