Jamstack Handbook – All things Jamstack with 3 step-by-step tutorials
jamstackhandbook.com
jamstackhandbook.com
It seems to me you need a few things:
- A dedicated development team to manage the stack
- Enough traffic to justify the complexity
- Regular content publishing to make use of the build pipeline
- A need for speed beyond what's regularly acceptable
Great work anyway on the book, it's good to see people charging for curated knowledge.
Jamstack is largely about removing complexity.
Maybe, but it's certainly not less complex then a traditional Wordpress site. So I'm wondering what are the criteria for using Jamstack successfully?
As you said it could be that it's good for simple static sites but not great for more complex content-drive sites - I don't know, that's what I'm asking.
That said, setting up something like Contentful and integrating it with NextJS is roughly a day or two of work if you're doing it for the first time. And it all works over REST so you don't have to worry about GraphQL.
You can even do "previews" now with Next thanks to preview mode: https://next-preview.now.sh/
there are also some open source solutions that are great. Netlify CMS works really well for a very basic page / blog management solution
a lot of the headless CMS solutions also offer generous free tiers, making it perfect for web devs to spin up a free instance for their personal sites and projects
This is more moving pieces and complexity. Yes it's easier to build the frontend using modern component models but I find the tradeoff is rarely worth it.
Not only is it now a very important ranking factor for SEO reasons. There's also going to be a point for most websites where the complexity (I'd argue that the standard WordPress install is a lot more complex than most JamStack setups, if you're going to be digging into the code) will eventually need to be offloaded to a build process that spits out a static site, just to meet the 'acceptable' threshold.
Jamstack, the complexity might be maintaining different services, such as a headless cms and the front end. the output though is static files that you can dump into static hosting pretty easily
on the other hand, you might have a serverful solution thats all in one stack. you run into other complexities with that like having to worry moreso about scaling and managing that server for traffic
there are tradeoffs between the 2. jamstack isn't a perfect solution but it has a lot of benefits. it's also relatively young in it's architectural lifecycle, so i would imagine a lot of these pain points to be worked out as it matures
the book tries to get into both the good and the challenging
AJAX is about loading HTML from the backend to the client dynamically.
JAMStack is about pre-rendering HTML from dynamic content into static files.
Where do the "Javascript and APIs" come into play, if not via AJAX?
My impression is that Jamstack is meant to include apps that render client side, but disclude apps that require a custom dynamic backend - serving static data and fetching it asynchronously is in, as is hitting third party APIs (the API part of JAM), but writing your own backend to serve data from a DB / etc. is out. Does that make sense?
Microsoft is already testing the waters with their own offering and I'm sure AWS and Google are as well. I'm not sure Netlify will survive the onslaught.
there are a LOT of pain points to deal with rolling out all that is included with the base netlify offering
hosting a static site is pretty easy - but configuring routing between cloudfront and s3 can be complicated so that the reequests don't always reference the root index.html
creating an autodeploy infrastructure can be challenging as well, tools like github actions might make that a little easier, but there are a lot of considerations there
it also makes these kinds of solutions more accessible to developers who might not have the understanding or interest to set up that kind of infrastructure. front end devs can build sites, connect, and go with little fuss
I think the market is larger for simplified services without the IAM and S3 cruft, especially when you have to educate the client on the solution.
Their redirects are a pain point though.
There is nothing for me to read, learn or discuss on the landing page unless I buy the book.
Note to author: perhaps more enticing would be to have 4 examples, the first being a free preview of the book and rest would require payment. Then people could evaluate your tutorial style.
It's more for prose than ecommerce but it's really pleasant to use and great for headless through its GraphQL interface.
I recently wrote a tutorial on how to use it with Gatsby & AWS serverless infrastructure so that everything is self-hosted but without the overhead of operating servers. https://docs.stackery.io/docs/tutorials/jamstack-ghostgatsby...
i personally use Netlify CMS for my website. it's not as feature rich as some other options, but for a personal blog, it gets the job done, and it's open source
I hope you get it up and running again soon, because I am very curious to know what your handbook is all about.
i'll try to see if i can figure out a way to reproduce
For the tutorials - the expectation is familiarity with Javascript and probably React, given the examples are React, though I walk through each steps with the code changes
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I’m seeing very little about the actual content of the book on the page. Could you please detail a little bit more about what’s actually covered? What apps are you building in those tutorials? Etc.
please let me know if you hvae more questions!