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)

Introduction to Netlify

Netlify, to someone who is new to web development, initially looks like a deployment and hosting platform.

In fact, a Netlify website can be a simple static file web host. Using Netlify's drag and drop feature, a folder of web files can be deployed as a real, functional, and hosted website in seconds, as shown:

Figure 14.1 – Netlify's drag and drop deployment interface

However, while it is a place to host your website, it is so much more than that.

Firstly, behind the scenes, when we initially created our Sanity and Gatsby-generated website, the code provided by Sanity and Gatsby Blog Template automatically runs it, thereby creating an integration between Sanity and Netlify.

Both Sanity Studio and the Gatsby-generated website were immediately built and hosted on Netlify's server, and new versions of the website could be easily and automatically deployed as often as we wish. Through integration connecting...