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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I still don't fully grok the term. Is it a loose/blanket term sorta like 'devops' or is it a more literal prescription of actual requirements and practices?

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A big problem is that the "Jamstack" branding and the website make it deliberately unclear that "JAM" is an acronym. I can't even find it expanded on the site. Instead it contains relatively verbose explanations that never become clearer than the actual words they so desperately avoid.

It's Javascript, API, Markup. Put "pre-rendered" before "Markup" and you understand everything.

Maybe they do this because they really want to push the fact that you can serve the J and M from a CDN?

They don't want it to be an acronym anymore: https://github.com/jamstack/jamstack.org/issues/279

It's in a similar category as "LAMP stack" or "MEAN stack", but more vague on details: JAM = Javascript + APIs + Markup. APIs tend to perform the role of a CMS (sometimes called "headless CMS"), and Markup tends to refer to declarative templating languages rather than code. The final output is compiled into static HTML+CSS+JS, which is obviously highly performant, compared to dynamically generated PHP/RoR/etc.

I can get that a significant part of it is just "static HTML," what I don't quite get is what makes it different than just static site generation. I guess that would be the "A" part...

Yea... SPA == same thing imho.

Marketing pretty much. Some vague cloud of "uses serverless to generate", "pushes static files to a CDN through an API", but if you drill down none of that is key to it. I.e. you'll find advocates state that if a site uses a static site generator or Netlify it's JAMStack.

no, that's it. jamstack - static site generator, but javascript

It mostly concerns how often content is updated.

Real-time: dynamically generated on the server-side. (e.g. injecting the current user's username)

Occasionally: Jamstack (e.g. rebuilding a static site every time a contributors adds a blog post via the CMS)

Rarely: manual updates (e.g. manually deploying a new version of a small-town restaurant's website when the menu changes)

More "REST" than "JSON". There's no Jamstack spec, no checkboxes to get your Jamstack compliance score. It is a description of a particular set of patterns and practices.

Jamstack is essentially a client/cloud model. Instead of client/server/db it is client with CDN and apis/microservices.

Jamstack is static sites/headless CMS, CDN for content/storage/speed, microservices/apis for data/auth/etc focused on speed, pre-rendering, and decoupling for easier swappable parts rather than monolith. [1]

[1] https://jamstack.org/what-is-jamstack/

tl;dr its basically just static html/js/css sitting in an s3 bucket, rather than having an active server (that you code/manage yourself).

It pushes the page rendering from runtime to build time.

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