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Jamstacked Issue 58

🏝 Summertime island architecture

Published: Jun 23, 2022

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​58 — June 23, 2022
✦ web version

If you follow Twitter (though I'm not recommending it), you may have noticed a lot of discussion by framework authors about the relative benefits of SPA (single page applications) versus MPA (multi-page applications) with the islands archtecture. Most of the discussion gets pretty deep in the weeds, but the terminology can be confusing. While you are probably familiar with SPAs, you may wonder what the heck is the "islands architecture"?

The reason for the name is because, rather than interactivity being controlled on the application level as in a SPA, the islands architecture has "islands" of interactivity on an otherwise static HTML page. JavaScript is only included as needed to rehydrate (i.e. update the state server-side) specific interactive components rather than the entire app. The canonical description is generally this post by Jason Miller. Examples of tools that use the islands architecture within Jamstack would be Astro or Slinkity (with Eleventy).

— Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's good

The Many Definitions of Server-Side Rendering
Zach explores the different ways that frameworks refer to server-side rendering and the ways it can confuse developers. Specifically, he says that application frameworks tend to frame SSR as an alternative to static (SSG) but component frameworks, on the other hand. don’t have a preference to whether SSR happens at build time or on a server.

Zach Leatherman

The Future Of Frontend Build Tools
The nature of frontend build tools like WebPack, Snowpack or Vite is shifting. They are moving towards being built in lower level languages like Rust to improve the speed and performance while also adding “unbundled development” using ES Modules to improve the local development experience. These tools often underly newer Jamstack frameworks.

Alexander Joseph


🗓 Upcoming Jamstack-Focused Conferences

Jamstack developers will have their choice of events this Summer and Fall. Netify’s Jamstack Conf just announced dates and locations: November 7–8 in both San Francisco and online. If you’re a Hugo developer, HugoConf is coming on July 8-9 and is free and online. Finally, Moar Serverless!! is a one-day event focused on serverless topics and will be August 11 for free and online.


❖ Tidbits

Building a Quiz with Eleventy and Eleventy Serverless
Eleventy Serverless allows you to do SSR via serverless functions in an Eleventy application and Ray uses this to build a demo that generates dynamic quizzes.

Raymond Camden

A Comprehensive Guide to NextJS Dynamic Routing
Dynamic routing essentially refers to the ability to serve multiple routes with different parameters from a single file, for example serve a post based upon the slug of a blog post. This guide walks you through how this works in Next.js.

Igor Silveira

★ Getting Started Guides for SSGs
CloudCannon has released a series of multi-part guides for various static site generators the cover what you need to know to get started. There are currently guides for Jekyll, Hugo and Eleventy.

CloudCannon

WordPress Platform Elementor Buys Jamstack Operator Strattic
This news was in the last issue of the newsletter, however this post offers more details about what’s next for Strattic and how that plays into the future of Wordpress.

Starr Campbell

✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...

  • Fresh – A new framework from Deno that uses just-in-time rendering at the edge and an islands-based hydration approach.
  • 11ty Second 11ty: Basics of Collections – Bryan Robinson explains Eleventy collections in under 110 seconds in this video.
  • Gatsby v4.17 – This release is focused on performance improvements for both JavaScript/CSS bundling and incremental builds.
  • Hugo v0.101.0 – New GIF animation image processing, a new hl_inline option for code highlighting, a new :slugorfilename permalink keyword and more.
  • How to Deploy an Astro Site to Netlify – A walkthrough by Salma Alam-Naylor for deploying Astro to Netlify.

Thanks for reading. Catch you next time. — Brian