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)

Summary of concepts

We began with an outline of the history of web development, showing how dynamic technology, such as Server Side Includes, eventually worked its way into static pages, adding functionality. These techniques, while adding more dynamicity, eventually led to server-side heaviness, increasing load time. Next, we introduced Sanity, a content delivery platform, and Sanity Studio, as a decoupled way to manage content, abandoning the monolithic approach that was pervasive for many years. Then we showed how its proprietary query language, GROQ, created an easy and terse way to interact with content and Sanity schemas.

Next, we compared GROQ with the familiar Standard Query Language (SQL). We introduced GraphQL, as a new way to query content as a specification, breaking away from RESTful. We introduced the GraphQL Playground as a way to easily and quickly create GraqhQL queries and visualize results.

Next, we introduced Gatsby, a framework for creating websites and apps...