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 7: Gatsby – An Introduction

Gatsby is the second part of the three-part Jamstack system used in this book. The definition that Gatsby gives for itself is as follows:

"A free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps."

Since it is a free and open source framework, all of the code is easily examined and modifiable. Secondly, the websites and apps that Gatsby produces are blazing fast because the HTML pages that it creates are actual files, and not just produced through backend processes written in server-side languages.

First, we'll learn what React is, then, we will look at how Gatsby's basic project is structured, examining its file and folder structure.

The main topics that we will cover in this chapter are as follows:

  • Gatsby, built on React
  • Gatsby basic project structure
  • The gatsby develop command