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Netlify CEO and coiner of terms here :) I would actually argue that Jamstack has won to the point of basically just being "Modern Web Development" by now. In
by bobfunk 3y ago
Netlify CEO and coiner of terms here :)
I would actually argue that Jamstack has won to the point of basically just being "Modern Web Development" by now.
In the 7 years since I first presented the term at Smashing Conference in San Francisco, I can't think of a single new successful commercial CMS that hasn't been headless or API first. I can't think of a single new successful commerce platform that's launched in that period, that hasn't been headless or API driven.
On the contrary, big existing players have mostly changed their strategy. Shopify is more and more embracing a decoupled approach of building globally distributed shop UI's with Remix (running either on their own platform or places like Netlify or Cloudflare) pulling in products, pricing and check out flows from their API layer. Most existing CMS companies have started integrating API first approaches into their strategy and in the data space we've seen an explosion of "Database as API" from Neon, to Supabase, to Xata or Converx, etc...
Part of the confusion has always been the conflation of Jamstack with "static" when even my first presentation on Jamstack back in 2016 had a big slide with the word static crossed out to underline that I personally didn't intend to conflate the two. The real game changer for treating the web UI as it's own decoupled application, and the backend as a set of API and services where some are your own running your core business logic, but a lot of them are provided by external providers.
At Netlify we're now focusing less on evangelizing the Jamstack approach of treating the web UI as it's own decoupled, independent layer, running on top of API's rather than stuffed into your backend systems - and more on helping really large companies adopt this at scale for their core web architectures (Composable Architectures). But not because we're any less bullish on the first part, on the contrary - because we don't really have to anymore!
And the article's conclusion that we somehow failed is absurd. Sites and apps on Netlify are visited by more than a billion unique visitors a month, we delivered more than 10 Petabyte of
data out of our network in December alone, have onboarded more than 4 million developers to our platform, and continue to prove that we can scale this architecture to some of the largest and most complex companies in the world, running big complex projects with faster time to market, higher productivity and higher conversions and revenue.
- jmuguy 3y agoThe author never actually articulated what his beef was with Netlify. So yeah I think you're just as confused as the rest of us. Apparently Netlify was supposed to become Heroku, but Heroku is bad, but Render (which is... Heroku with a fresh coat of paint) isn't? I dunno.
- cpursley 3y agoRender is (a cheaper) Heroku + Netlify ;)
- giovannibonetti 3y agoRender seems to have autoscaling with a reasonable round-robin load balancer [1], whereas Heroku only has autoscaling in (expensive) Private Spaces [2] with a dumb load balancer [3]. [1] https://feedback.render.com/features/p/docs-on-how-renders-load-balancer-works https://feedback.render.com/features/p/docs-on-how-renders-l... [2] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scaling#autoscaling https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scaling#autoscaling [3] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing#request-distribution https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing#request-d...
- cpursley 3y agoAnd Render also handles distribution Elixir which is impossible on Heroku and a pain to roll yourself. Plus, they have free static/SPAs.
- shiftpgdn 3y agoJAMStack isn't modern web development. 80% of the internet still runs on PHP on traditional servers. Netlify is needless complexity (nevermind the vendor lock-in) 99% of developers will never need. You also don't address the OP's points where Netlify has suffered the same fate of "enshitification" where features slowly get stripped out and moved into pay to use buckets, likely at the behest of needing to payback 100+ million dollars in VC funding.
- bobfunk 3y agoObjectively speaking our free tier today have far more features, higher limits and more capabilities than it's ever had before. We are also building a real, longterm sustainable enterprise business. We're not a non-profit and we're here to create a big lasting company that can keep investing into the future of the web.
- shiftpgdn 3y agohttps://www.netlify.com/pricing/#pricing-table-full-feature-list https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#pricing-table-full-feature-... Almost every feature you charge for is something you can achieve for free inside of a basic VPS. I understand you have the classic SV "Hotel California" model where you can check in but you can never leave. But frankly this makes the internet worse in every way possible and part of the point of the original article.
- blitz_skull 3y agoYo. Thanks for Netlify. It’s legit and I, for one, welcome our new overlords. All jesting aside it’s easily one of the most pleasant developer experiences you can have as a modern web dev in 2023. Everything just works and failures are loud, obvious, and usually dead simple to fix. Well done, says I.
- irrational 3y agoI've been doing web development since 1997, but posts like these let me know how far out of the loop I have become. I have no idea what Jamstack, Netlify, Headless CMS, etc. even are. I'm still in the: here is a webpage (html, css, js) that makes an ajax/fetch call to a webservice that SQL queries a Postgres database and returns the results as a JSON string.
- pharmokiss 3y agoThat's all they're doing, too. They're just hiding it behind a paywall and a bunch of needless abstraction.
- te_chris 3y agoHonestly, I've just finished 5 years as CTO with an e-com company with our CMS built on Elixir and I can't tell you how wrong you are. Jamstack, headless CMS and SPA frontends etc are just a massive waste of time. There's no joy in having separate code for your API and frontend. Our pages rendered in 20ms.
- perelin 3y agohonest question: sounds like a cool architecture! care to give some insights how you achieve this?
- te_chris 3y agoSure: key idea is pages are documents. Each page contains a JSON blob which specifies the blocks it's made up of and the content for each block. Each block is just a module with a schema specifying the data it takes and an associated template and a render function. Rendering a page is a URL resolution -> Controller -> DB lookup for the page -> pass the block list to a master render function and done. The thing some people don't realise is EEx is compiled to a function call, which means no string interpolation, regex whatever. Getting a bunch of HTML is just a function call.
- paradox460 3y agoI worked at an ecom that used Elixir instead of an spa, with the backend being the older legacy app, and elixir rendering pages based off API data from the backend. This was well before live view It worked amazingly fast. Some things were painful, and would have been better served with some progressive enhancement via a dollop of frontend js, but they were rather small exceptions When I left a few years back they'd undergone some leadership turnover and the new wanted to migrate to some messy jamstack thing. They had millions of SKUs. Last I heard they migration hadn't gone anywhere
- te_chris 3y agoTale as old as time lol. Elixir is uniquely great at content sites due to the fast template rendering - but it’s really not about Ex at all. Just don’t drown in unnecessary moving parts and build tools. It’s just a website.
- boredumb 3y agoJamstack is "Modern Web Development"? Are we back to that point in the webdev rollercoaster where everyone pretends like embedding business logic in a client using javascript is a good idea?
- gardenhedge 3y agoWhere else are you going to put it?
- xnx 3y agoOn the server
- paultopia 3y agoFWIW, I love you, Netlify CEO. I've got a bunch of different static-ish websites hosted with you---my personal site, the sites for three different books, etc., etc. Everything is build using the CI, with a different frameworks and/or build processes (essentially whatever I felt like playing with at the time), and it makes it incredibly easy and cheap. So don't listen to the haters.
- cutler 3y ago> I would actually argue that Jamstack has won to the point of basically just being "Modern Web Development" by now. Don't you think there might be just a little bit of hubris creeping in here? JAMSTACK is such a niche/fringe it's not worth talking about. I'm a solo dev and network with many others. I don't think I've ever heard JAMSTACK mentioned let alone adopted. You're living in a self-generated bubble.
- no_butterscotch 3y agoI agree with you. I've been in web dev for the past 10 years and none of the companies I've worked at in San Fran use this tech. I'm familiar with the space: Gatsby, GraphQL, etc. I took a Jamstack course on frontendmasters, but I chose to skip using it for personal projects.
- figassis 3y agoI don’t really understand the concept of Jamstack or why it’s new. Isn’t it just HTML+JS (whether built with a framework such as Angular, React, Svelte, Gatsby, etc) that uses a backend api? What exactly are we discovering? What is the innovation here? Markdown?
- Takennickname 3y agoLol. Masterclass in how to lose good will: claim that 80% of developers are outdated.