If you are a developer who loves writing, this post is for you. You might have already authored more than a dozen posts on DEV or you might be planning to write something (like me!). But what if you can also create a blog site of your own out of these posts. If you want to find out how, hang on tight.
The Elephant
First of all let us address the elephant in the room. JAMStack basically stands for Javascript, APIs and Markdown. But the JAM Stack is not about specific technologies. It’s a new way of building websites and apps. You may have already seen or worked on a JAM Stack site! They do not have to include all attributes of JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. They might be built using sites built by hand, or with Jekyll, Hugo, Nuxt, Next, Gatsby, or another static site generator.
The thing that they all have in common is that they don’t depend on a web server.
On a conventional website when you request a page, the request is sent from the client (your browser) to the server hosting the website. Here the server parses your request and fetches the data from the database. Then the data is processed and sent to your client. The client then renders the data into a form you can view.
On a JAMStack website the data to be served to the user is compiled at deploy time. Ergo, when a request is received by the web server, it simply sends the pre-compiled data that can be readily rendered. We save time, the performance increases because lesser resources are required, the security is increased because the surface area for attacks are reduced and it is easier to scale since only the number of static files increase (CDNs are perfect for this use case).
In conclusion, JAMStack websites work by storing the data in static files that can be readily served without further processing. For a website serving blog posts this is more than ideal, because once a post is published it is rarely edited again, it remains static. And that’s why we are here.
In the next post you can find out how to create a JAMStack website using your own posts on DEV.