Architecting a blogging platform on the Jamstack with On-demand Builders

#jamstack #odb

I started a small discussion with the developer experience team here at Netlify, and and transcribed it for those interested and thinking about building larger-scale services.

The question

How would you architect a blogging platform with the Jamstack? A platform where users can:

Log in/Log out
Create blog posts
Publish them on their own URLs to share (like blogplatform.com/cassidoo/mypost)

Many people think that this is where server-side rendering rules, and the Jamstack falls short.

But behold, Phil Hawksworth had some good things to say!

Phil’s response

2 parts to this question:

1. Can Jamstack serve user-generated and user-centric content for many users?

Yep. app.netlify.com does this with a statically served app shell, and an API for more than 2 millions users and teams. It’s both dynamic, and personalized.

But… blog posts are better not served as JSON which is rendered client-side like the content in the app.netlify.com example. So, question 2…

2. Can Jamstack deliver rendered content for user-generated and user-centric content?

Not at scale until the advent of On-demand Builders (ODB) and its friends.

On-demand Builders are a type of serverless function that speed up build times for large sites by breaking content into two categories: critical content, which is automatically compiled at build time, and deferred content, which is built upon user request. On-demand builders enables you to incrementally build your site and is designed to work with any framework.

Now, it is pretty attractive as an architecture really. It’s like a slight evolution of the Virtual Lolly example I have, where we add auth and rendering via ODB.

With the number of core pages being generated in the build kept to a few hundred (like, the main boilerplate and UI pages, and perhaps the most popular few hundred blog post pages), it could easily be re-deployed with a time period of a few hours so a “fresh” view of the most popular posts and related articles could be pre-generated regularly enough to be fit for purpose.

All of the above architecture is viable right now, with the exception of a listing of latest posts per user on a URL like /{USER}/POSTS, which would need ODB to support expiring a URL so that it updates when a new post is added. But that view could come from a serverless function or edge handler. The blog post pages themselves via ODB are fine. (until we add ability to modify published posts, at which point the same logic as above applies).

Thanks, Phil! Now what?

Whew! I love learning, don’t you?

If you’d like to learn more about applications of On-demand Builders, the architecture they implement, serverless, and moooore, here’s some good spots to get started: