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)

The evolution of the Jamstack

The evolution of the Jamstack can be easily explained by looking at how the World Wide Web evolved, starting with its most central component, HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

HTML

The very first web pages were simply comprised of text with HTML tags, providing markup instructions with the ability to link pages together. In fact, HTML is often mistaken by the average person as a programming language, but it was, at the most fundamental level, a series of symbols that represented formatting instructions. It still gets included in programming language lists, together with actual programming languages such as C and Java. It is merely a markup language, though, despite having evolved rapidly to now include accessibility and semantic features. This means that it is not much more than markup. In its earliest versions, however, it simply provided general formatting instructions.

For example, we could use an h1 tag to represent the header of a page, which...