What is JAMstack, and why you should consider it for your next project

What does jam have to do with developing?

Luckily, JAM doesn’t stand for food.

J is for JavaScript. As a developing language handling any dynamic programming during the request/response cycle.

A is for APIs. Server-side operations are abstracted into reusable APIs and accessed over HTTPS with JavaScript. These can be third-party services or your custom function.

M is for Markup

. Templated markup should be pre-built at build time, usually using a site generator for content sites or a build tool for web apps.

In a nutshell, JAMstack is a new way of building websites and apps that deliver better performance, higher security, and lower scaling costs.

How does it work?

What JAMstack does is generate the HTML once and serve it to all requests. It fetches HTML from CDN, where an HTML file has been pre-built and is ready to be downloaded. No server is involved in the process, and the API does all the heavy lifting.

To put it visually, it looks like this:

What confuses most people is when someone says JAMstack is static. You must be asking now what does it mean to be “static”? Does it take “dynamic” server data and “dynamic” user input?

The static JAMstack app is only a fairly generic term.

JAMstack is a general web app without the server part and served with static site generator HTML plus JavaScript. With all that, it’s able to do dynamic things.

Static refers to static assets, for example, JavaScript and Markup from the name, rather than a dumb static page.

Why do developers love JAMstack?

The main benefits of JAMstack are better performance, higher security, cheaper scaling, and better developer experience. All pretty valid reasons to start using JAMstack.

That’s the JAMstack power.

But is the JAMstack just at the top of its glory, or will it become the standard? Read more here.