If you can’t define something, does it even really exist?
This is the question I’m pondering as I sat through an hour-long panel discussion of Jamstack in which the participants attempted to decouple the word from its vendor origins.
It took an hour of haggling before host Mike Neumegan and panelists Salma Alam-Naylor, Cassidy Williams, Bryan Robinson and Zach Leatherman agreed to this: Jamstack’s pillars are portability (meaning not locked into one vendor), immutable (although one panelist challenged that word as being too close to business jargon), and a site delivered as HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
That’s a shift from the original definition, which Netlify’s CEO Matt Biilmann defined in 2015 as an architectural approach to web development that leverages Javascript, API, and Markup.
The definition may be beside the point. What was more illuminating was the conversation the panel had along the way.
A panel of web developers discussed the future of JamStack recently.
Jamstack brought developers together across JavaScript framework boundaries and the panelists miss that. Specifically, they miss Netlify’s Jamstack Discord server, where those conversations could happen. Netlify shuttered the Discord last year when its marketing shifted away from the Jamstack and toward composable architecture.
Granted, Netlify still uses the Jamstack approach for its own web assets today. But two of the panelists who previously worked at Netlify — Alam-Naylor and Williams — said that Jamstack expanded to encompass too much.
“If I might just shout at capitalism, I think we pulled in a whole lot of things saying, yes, that counts, yes, that counts — for the shareholders,” said Williams, now the chief technology officer at AI productivity company Contenda. “Because if it counts, then that means it can be hosted on this thing. And if we end up saying these are the guarantees you have, these are the rules, then, yes, it gets rid of certain things, but it’s better for the community and the learners and not necessarily the companies that host them.”
Her comment elicited a thumbs up from Leatherman (also an ex-Netlify employee), who is now a developer advocate at CloudCannon and creator/maintainer of the Eleventy open source site generator, and Robinson, who heads developer relations at Hygraph (previously GraphCMS).
That is how the conversation came to focus on an anti-capitalist Jamstack, or a Jamstack for the people, if you will.
It’s worth remembering here that JamStack was first presented as an alternative to the WordPress world. WordPress was built on (or for) the LAMP stack bundle of Linux for the operating system, the web server Apache, the database server MySQL, and the programming language PHP.
For Leatherman, Jamstack therefore comes down to a question of portability — which was something Jamstack in theory promised, but he felt that hosting providers didn’t necessarily want.
“In some respects, it feels like each of these different hosting providers have created their own versions of PHP,” Leatherman said. “You have to write your code that works in all of these different PHP versions. And it’s just not something that I feel like framework developers want to do…. But that’s the vendor lock-in aspect of this whole discussion, right? Is that folks want the code to be written to their specific hosting APIs, and they don’t want it to be easy to swap to others.”
Jamstack even expanded somehow to include server-side rendering (SSR). This despite the fact a key characteristics of the Jamstack had been pre-rendered static sites, where the core content and structure of a website are pre-rendered as HTML files during the build process.
“SSR capabilities have been built into frameworks nowadays,” Alam-Naylor said. “One of the things is that a lot of the starter templates in these frameworks, they come with just everything SSR, because you can. And I think that’s where maybe the lines have got a bit blurred. ‘I’m using a framework that works on the Jamstack,’ but you’re just SSRing everything because you can.”
Adding to the confusion is that the definition of SSR changed, Leatherman added.
“Some people think of SSR in terms of request time rendering, which is maybe a completely different definition [to] if you think of SSR as just pre-generated HTML,” he said. “So it’s not request generated, but it’s built as part of your build. And I think there have been some maybe grey areas that people have used to their advantage in terms of marketing, when it comes to using SSR and maybe the dual definitions there, especially when it comes to client-side rendered JavaScript frameworks.”
The panelists agreed that it’s important to define the Jamstack in a way that doesn’t lock-in developers to any one vendor’s solution or tooling — or any one framework, for that matter.
In general, they expressed a frustration with the division that all the various JS frameworks have introduced into the web development community.
“Interestingly, one of my favorite parts about being in the Jamstack community in various ways — in the Slack group, and the Discord, on Twitter, or wherever it was — was, honestly, I didn’t have to go looking for news about technology that I cared about,” Robinson acknowledged. “The laziness inside of me said, the communities bring all this to me, it’s amazing, and if you make it too niche, you don’t get that. But that’s just the value that it brought me. There’s a lot of other value that it can bring. I’m wondering what did you all think that the value of that community was to the people in the community?”
“For me, it’s the cross-tooling, community sharing that happened,” Leatherman said. “For me, the real value proposition of the Jamstack as participant was meeting people outside of the community that I was already in, getting introduced to folks that are doing things maybe a little bit different than me, but that still shared some of the same core values that I put into my development stack.”
“It felt friendly, because it was about ideas around things and different ways of building stuff,” added Williams.
Alam-Naylor, who now works as a senior developer advocate at Sentry, agreed that the community felt welcoming and non-fractured.
“Someone asked me a similar question yesterday, and they said to me, why don’t you align yourself with a framework when you teach? Why aren’t you making like Next.js content or Vue content?” She said. “It’s because that’s not what it’s about. These different frameworks are all valid in their own ways and solve different problems and have different benefits in their own ways. Again, […] that’s why I was drawn to the Jamstack community — it’s because it was about a way of building, not what you’re building with.”
It’s a conversation that’s harder today, particularly as framework “wars” dominate web development discussions and increasingly segregate web developers, she continued. “We’ve got to that point where there are lots of walls and lots of branching logic in the definition of Jamstack right now,” she added.
“As Mike was saying, the definition of Jamstack ended up getting broader and broader and more and more things were encompassed in it,” Alam-Naylor said. “The community therefore got broader and bigger, to a point where there was no real semblance of any relationships anymore. And I think in order to forge the relationships that you want in a community, you need to start off small and you need to start off constrained. And that’s what it did do and then it got bigger.”
The frontend developers on the panel are not alone in looking to fill the void left by Jamstack. At thefutureofjamstack.org, a site run by CloudCannon, there’s a discussion happening about Jamstack, including whether or not the term has too much baggage. The contributors — including those on this panel — are divided over whether the term can be salvaged.
So is Jamstack dead or so evolved beyond its original definition as to be meaningless? Can the concept be saved?
“I feel like we got dogmatic about Jamstack, that we shouldn’t pitch Jamstack as a silver bullet for every use case, the best thing ever,” suggested Neumegan, who is the CEO of CloudCannon. “It should be pitched as, it’s great at these use cases, it’s not so good at these ones. I feel like that’s a more intellectually honest answer. And for a newcomer to web development, they can grapple and get their head around what it is.”
