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Comment by bauerd | Hacker News Reader

The invention of the "JAM stack" is one of the greatest marketing stunts I know of. Kudos to Netlify for rebranding HTML+AJAX

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I have yet to encounter a link/email about "JAM Stack", including meetup invites, that isn't trying to sell me something. That there seems to be so many people hopping on this train confuses me.

How come?

AJAX is about loading HTML from the backend to the client dynamically.

JAMStack is about pre-rendering HTML from dynamic content into static files.

I've had good luck with serverless WSGI.

> 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?

Just to be clear, what do you mean with AJAX?

Making asynchronous requests to fetch data. In this context specifically, the common case of fetching data asynchronously and then rendering it to the DOM.

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?

The problem that Netlify has is that they are simply a feature of the big cloud providers.

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.

i think there's a lot of truth to that - but they do is so fantastically well

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 second this. Players like Netlify and Digital Ocean have a ridiculous amount of mindshare for solving a certain problem faster without the complexity that the big cloud providers bring.

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.

Netlify is impressively slick and streamlined.. It took like 5 minutes to host a Nuxt app from a private repo with SSL.. And that includes setting up the Netlify account.

Their redirects are a pain point though.

Agreed. As much as I would hate it as someone who utilizes their services, Netlify should look for an exit. AWS is probably the best bet. Between services such as Github Pages, Vercel, and Firebase there’s a lot of competition.

Adding to this, if you have markdown files in your website directory and simply pull them in and render them via Javascript, search engines will still index your markdown files. Your content is still discoverable.

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