Book Image

Jumpstart Jamstack Development

By : Christopher Pecoraro, Vincenzo Gambino
Book Image

Jumpstart Jamstack Development

By: Christopher Pecoraro, Vincenzo Gambino

Overview of this book

Jamstack (JavaScript, API, and Markup) enables web developers to create and publish modern and maintainable websites and web apps focused on speed, security, and accessibility by using tools such as Gatsby, Sanity, and Netlify. Developers working with Jamstack will be able to put their knowledge to good use with this practical guide to static site generation and content management. This Jamstack book takes a hands-on approach to implementation and related methodologies that will have you up and running with modern web development in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, you'll begin by building an event and venue schema structure, and then expand the functionality, exploring all that the Jamstack has to offer. You’ll learn how an example Jamstack is built, build structured content using Sanity to create a schema, use GraphQL to expose the content, and employ Gatsby to build an event website using page and template components and Tailwind CSS Framework. Lastly, you’ll deploy the website to both, a Netlify server and the Microsoft Static Web Apps Service, and interact with it using Amazon Alexa. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge and skills you need to install, configure, build, extend, and deploy a simple events website using Jamstack.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Chapter 1: History of the Jamstack

Welcome to the Jamstack. This completely new web development paradigm has excited the information technology industry and is becoming steadily more popular, with new companies constantly forming around it. This book is one of the first of a few tutorials available focused on practical and hands-on experience with the Jamstack.

A technology stack represents a specific collection of languages, databases, and operating systems, such as the LAMP stack. The acronym LAMP stands for Linux, an operating system; Apache, a web server; MySQL, a database; and PHP, a programming language. The Jamstack is actually not a stack in this sense, but rather a new methodology and toolset to produce websites and web applications.

In this chapter, we're going to first look at the history of the web, introduce the Jamstack, and discuss its advantages. To understand how the Jamstack evolved into what it is today, we need to look back at the more-than-two-decade...