Making it future proof
Over the last 6 years we’ve been working in a space affectionately termed JAMStack. Wait, what? That’s a ridiculous name. OK, let me explain a little. JAMStack is short for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup, and is an architectural pattern for building modern web applications. It emphasises a static approach to web development, where the application's frontend is prebuilt and served as static files.
Cool, I guess, silly name still!
What’s JAM got to do with being future proofed?
Well, these files are generated during the build process and can be hosted on a content delivery network (CDN) for fast and scalable distribution.
The dynamic functionality of the application is achieved by leveraging JavaScript to communicate with various APIs, fetching data and performing server-side actions as needed. This decoupling of the frontend from the backend enables better performance, security, and scalability. The important bit here is the decoupling. The frontend of your site is independent to the backend CMS or source(s) of your data.
You can have a React or Next.js frontend, all responsive and immersive. Then say you have a marketing team that uses Wordpress for creating pages and blog posts. Well, this team of creators can use Wordpress and power the pages or blog posts of the frontend. What about if you have collected a ton of spreadsheet data in Google Sheets and you want to be able to show some of these metrics on the frontend of your site in some nice ? No problem, we can integrate that data into the frontend.
If that same marketing team wants to migrate pages to Sanity Studio for better structuring of content but they still quite like to write blog posts in Wordpress? Then the switch over can be transitioned until all the data is migrated. This is future-proofing your website. Allowing the content creators of your site to add the content where they feel comfortable and efficient.
This decoupling doesn’t restrict your website to be one thing. You don’t have a “Wordpress theme” which becomes a monolithic in proportions and a beast to manage.
Speed and security…
In the JAMStack approach, the markup of the application is generated during the build process and stored as static files. This eliminates the need for server-side rendering and allows the application to be served directly from a CDN, resulting in faster page loads and improved user experience. The APIs are used to fetch data and interact with external services, such as databases or third-party APIs, enabling dynamic functionality while keeping the frontend static. This approach also promotes better security since there are no server-side vulnerabilities, and it allows for easy scalability by offloading the burden from the backend servers to the CDN.
Where this becomes helpful in real terms is with sites powered by booking SASS apps. Sweetcombe Cottage Holidays and Cornish Holiday Cottages benefit from this approach by having their booking data resolved through our Gateway graph application. If they decide to switch booking SASS it’s a simple process of changing credentials and pulling in data from another source. Keeping them as “business as usual“ as possible. You can read a bit more about how we helped Sweetcombe Cottage Holidays and Cornish Holiday Cottages in our case studies
Overall, JAMStack provides a modern and efficient way to develop web applications, combining the benefits of static site generation, JavaScript interactivity, and serverless APIs.
