Introduction to JAMstack: a Way of Building Modern Websites And Web Applications

JAMstack is an architecture for building fast, scalable, and more secure services and products on the web with interchangeable services and prerendering.

In simpler terms, JAMstack is about building websites that combine the best of static (infrequent changes in content and data) and dynamic sites (content and data changes often in response to user actions). With this approach, you can build highly interactive and content-rich web experiences that still perform well.

The secret lies in the name JAMstack itself: a contraction of the words JavaScript, APIs, and Markdown, and “stack” because it offers a choice of technologies.

Unlike other stacks like MERN (from mongo, express.js, react, and node), JAMstack doesn’t concern itself with technology choices, but rather with core principles such as decoupling and prerendering. This decoupling from technology makes JAMstack a viable option both when starting from scratch and for improving an existing service.

In this article, we are going to explore what makes up JAMstack, get to know the terminology, discuss where JAMstack should and shouldn’t be used, and walk you through one possible JAMstack conversion and its benefits. The article focuses on giving an overview of JAMstack, and you don’t…