Introduction
The world of modern web development never fails us. Every year we explore horizons in terms of technologies and tools in web development. These technologies and tools influence your daily lives, inspire your work approach, and affect your overall business operations.
Now we understand how important websites and web-based solutions are for businesses. Even in today’s digital age they allow brands to maintain an online presence, and provide accessibility to their users, there is data collection and analytics, and much more a business can do. Whether you are a business owner or a web developer, understanding and gaining insights about these trends can help you attain a competitive edge. Hence, this blog explores the JAMstack architecture and its benefits for both developers and business owners.
Traditional Web Development Challenges
Did you know that there are more than 1.13 billion websites in the world, out of which 82% of websites were deactivated. Now this deactivation can be due to various issues like cyber attacks, expired domains, maintenance issues, content violations or not being able to overcome traditional web development challenges.
Further exploring the reasons, Some of the most common challenges are mentioned below:
Server-Side Rendering
SSR allows the user to view the page of a website or web application by requesting it from the server. For basics, it’s an HTML file saved on the server. When the client requests the file, the server can send the file as a response in a fully rendered format. Now the issues are high cost, resource intensive, complexity, and lastly slow rendering due to multiple requests.
Reliance on Database
The main challenge faced by a developer or a business is to maintain the database. Databases are essential for storing and retrieving data, however there can be scalability issues, lack of caching, and difficulty in testing which leads to a major problem. Improper database management can result in performance issues, degraded UX, privacy breaches, etc. You need an alternative or a strong database management tool to eliminate this particular problem.
Bottlenecks and Scalability Issues
Resource constraints, inadequate planning of infrastructure, and database performance are some of the common bottlenecks. These bottlenecks will either disrupt the user experience or affect your overall performance and scalability. Nowadays every website design services provider looks to increase the scalability of their web app or website. The reason is quite simple: the growing demand of users and customers as well as adhering to the latest trends in technologies.
Even for a website developer there these challenges and bottlenecks can slow down the development process and ultimately the delivery of the app. The primary reason for a business to make its own website is to make an online presence and reach out to its customers conveniently. And If you are a skilled web developer you understand the importance of user experience in the modern world.
What I’m trying to help you understand is businesses and web experts are constantly looking to eliminate these challenges and bottlenecks. Doing so can give them a boost to achieve their overall organizational goals much faster. Hence as an effort to learn about the solution, let’s focus on exploring JAMstack architecture.
What is JAMstack: Simplifying Website Infrastructure
JAMstack is not a tool or framework, nor it can be defined as a technology, It’s more like an ‘Architecture’. An approach to achieve efficiency, scalability, and quality in this modern web development enabled industry. It’s like a set of best practices and principles one could follow to unlock the maximum pool of benefits for your organization, business, or solutions as a developer.
The component of the JAMstack approach is given in the following image below.
- JavaScript: If your web applications crave dynamic functionality you have probably used JavaScript. For client-side rendering and interactivity, you use JavaScript in JAMstack.
- APIs: To deliver content and robust functionality, APIs become part of JAMstack. Remember JAMstack extensively uses APIs to retrieve and manipulate content from various sources efficiently.
- Markup: One of the core principles mentioned above is pre-rendering, the term is not hard to understand, here markup is nothing but HTML pages. The HTML pages that make websites are pre-rendered during the development and web app building process. This improves efficiency and makes your apps or website faster.
The Two Core Principles
The foundation of JAMstack approaches involves playing with JavaScript, APIs, and markups. When learning more about the three you will unveil two core principles: Pre-Rendering and Decoupling.
Pre-Rendering
The JAMstack architecture is heavily dependent on pre-rendering. Pre-rendering refers to pre-building the entire front-end with HTML files. This eliminates the load of processing every on-demand request which further loads the whole application or website.
For properly utilizing this principle you need to have sufficient knowledge about site generation tools. You pre-built all the site results that are supposed to be requested by the client and fetch it directly from CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Decoupling
When you are developing a website you need to focus on multiple stages to produce an end result. Let’s focus on the basics, in a website there are a lot of stages right? If you divide those stages and each stage has its own team focusing on that particular stage, the end results improve 10x fold.
Decoupling is creating a separation between each stage of services or system you are developing. Now each separation is scalable, upgradable, and you can focus on the quality too. Moreover, it improves the delivery time of a system or the speed at which you are providing web development services.
Again the basic; core benefits of decoupling are building websites in a faster, smoother, and easier way with excellent quality.
Benefits of JAMstack
While exploring the whole JAMstack approach you will find that it has a plethora of benefits. We are here to discuss the most impactful one that made the architecture more popular among web developers.
Demand for Dynamic Features
Feature-rich development becomes convenient once you start working with JAMstack. This is due to JAMstack consisting of APIs and Markup which improves dynamic functionalities. One can keep up with the new trends, i.e demand of dynamic and interactive content by the users.
Simplicity
Pre-rendered static files from the CDN eliminate most of the complexity your system or service faces. No chaotic data in the back-end server results in faster deployment and trouble-free maintenance of the system.
Performance and Scalability
Remember we talked about CDN somewhere above, JAMstack architecture is significantly benefited by Content Distribution Network. CDN provides reliability and speed to the architecture and as the caching is done closer to the user it enables your system with amazing UX.
Security and Reliability
Pre-rendered static content is comparatively more secure as it is read-only in nature. Server-side dynamic content might be prone to hacking attempts and malware problems. Again CDN, the greatest benefactor in this approach, allows global hosting, hence making JAMstack sites resilient to server outages. If you are a business that cannot afford to lose users due to downtime, then JAMstacks sites are highly recommended due to their reliability.
Adaptability
In JAMstack architecture you use static site generator tools that can integrate the modern web development tools to keep up with the trends. The approach can build an ecosystem where your solutions and services can easily prosper and keep up with the dynamic changes the market throws at you.
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Conclusion
Until now only elevating the user experience was a crucial variable in the proficiency equation for every professional website development company. Well, Not anymore! JAMstacks highly focuses on the web developers’ experience too. The amount of flexibility it provides, scalability, feature-rich functionalities and much more make it a popular approach for web enthusiasts and experts.
Using JAMstack you can conveniently tackle the modern challenges of the website development process. Simplifying the process using a set of architectural principles is one of the best ways to deliver superior results and drive growth to your organization or for your clients.
“You think of web development as baking a cake, but this is a cake baking competition, so you need to have the best resources, skilled experts, and approaches. JAMstack is one of them, we utilize it to give our clients, so they stay ahead of their competition”