User:Vasu Chashmawala

What is JAMStack?

JAM is an acronym for JavaScript API Markup. What does it mean though? It is not a framework or a specific technology. It is more of an architectural approach. A modern way web content is built, managed and distributed.

According to the official site, JAMStack means:

Modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup.

One of the key parts of JAMStack Architecture is switching to static. That means, using a Static Site Generator to build your site into plain old HTML, CSS, and JS, which does not change and can be served over CDN. If you need to make a change, you just rebuild the whole site. It is fast since most of the site remains the same. Moreover, the deploy takes very little time as it means only copying a bunch of files.

One important part to realize is that static does not mean limited interactivity and static data. The key part is that HTML and JS files served by the server are static. They're not changing. However, you still have JavaScript on the client. You can do everything you do in JS. That means you can fetch any data you need through an API call (usually REST or GraphQL) once your static page is loaded. The key difference is that the HTML with dynamic data is not constructed on the server, but rather on the client. Of course, in many cases, your site is really static and no API calls are necessary.

See, How to build with the JAMStack.