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 rise of the Jamstack

The Jamstack represents all that was good about the initial days of web design, together with all of the things that are good about modern web development. Static site generation, as it's sometimes referred to, means simply generating a website comprised of pages that are literally files and nothing more. There is no backend preprocessor and no database, and all of the server complexity is abstracted away.

The Jamstack acronym explained

The Jamstack acronym stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. Since a static site page cannot be produced by any real-time preprocessing, all dynamic aspects of the page must be achieved through JavaScript, which will perform all page interactions.

JavaScript will communicate with external systems, such as search engines, using application programming interfaces (APIs). The use of APIs is a modern way of either leveraging pre-built external Software-as-a-Service (SAAS), such as Algolia's search API, or using...