< Back to archive

Jamstacked Issue 29

Jamstack and on demand page rendering

Published: Apr 29, 2021

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​29 — April 29, 2021
✦ web version

There are a two trends in Jamstack that seem to be having a quick impact, as can be seen by this week's links.

The first is the concept, first introduced by Next.js (I believe), of Incremental Persistent Rendering. This is essentially "on demand" page rendering that is especially critical for large sites with long build times. Netlify recently released their Distributed Persistent Rendering recently, which essentially achieves the same result.

The other is an increasing adoption of Jamstack + Wordpress rather than the Jamstack vs. Wordpress that so recently dominated the discussion. Gatsby seems to be leading the way with their plugin and starters, but there are a lot of other tools and services now supporting a similar architecture.

— Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's Good

A Complete Guide To Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) with Next.js
Next.js added a new wrinkle to Jamstack called incremental static regeneration (ISR). This helps large sites that would normally have extremely long compile times choose to render certain pages “on demand”. This article discusses the concept in detail.

Lee Robinson

Using New Gatsby Source WordPress Plugin
A look at some of the options for integrating the Gatsby Source WPGraphQL to integrate headless Wordpress and whether it is worthwhile option for Wordpress developers.

Ganesh Dahal

Slow Jamstack Builds: Netlify's Solution Is Distributed Persistent Rendering
A deeper look at the concepts behind Netlify’s Distributed Persistent Rendering proposal released last week, what it shares with common web development practices and why it isn’t making Jamstack more complex (in Matt Biilmann’s opinion). You can read about how to use DPR using Netlify's Essential Next.js plugin here.

Richard MacManus

✂︎ Tools and Resources

  • Cusdis - A new, open-source comment tool that bills itself as the "privacy-friendly alternative to Disqus."
  • Announcing Native TypeScript support for Netlify Functions - You can now write Netlify Functions in JavaScript, Go and TypeScript.
  • Click/Deploy Event - A new event on June 3rd being organized by Henri Helvetica that covers Jamstack plus Wordpress.
  • Next.JS Themes - A curated list with open-source Next JS Themes released under permissive licenses.
  • Sergey - An intentionally "tiny" SSG that is basically is HTML + partials with slots.

❖ Tidbits

Tina Cloud, The Next Iteration of Forestry
Tina Cloud is a hosted version of Tina CMS targeted primarily at Next.js. The plan is to offer existing Forestry CMS users a migration path later this year and then sunset Forestry CMS. You can read more about Tina Cloud here.

Scott Gallant

Building a Database Driven Eleventy Site
It turns out that it’s pretty easy to connect an Eleventy site to a MySQL data source for data at build time. Ray walks through how.

Raymond Camden

Trailing Slashes and Gatsby
Why ensuring your URLs have trailing slashes is important and how to enforce it using Gatsby and Netlify.

Jon Sully

Jamstack Needs a New Name
Do we need to rebrand Jamstack? Robert thinks so. Personally, I disagree. While readers know I think the JAM acronym is confusing and should be retired, I think a rename can cause confusion (and I don’t feel that the name is a detriment at this point).

Robert Richardson

Thanks for reading. Catch you next time — Brian