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Jamstacked Issue 64

Shifting away from client-side JavaScript?

Published: Sep 15, 2022

Your update on all things Jamstack

#​64 — September 15, 2022
✦ web version

There's been a small but noticeable shift, in my opinion, in developer attitudes towards JavaScript frameworks, particularly React. Tools like Astro, Eleventy and SvelteKit have pushed developers away from single-page apps (SPA) towards multi-page apps (MPA) with less client-side JavaScript. Along these lines, the folks at Begin recently released their Enhance framework that focuses on HTML and native web-standards based features. You can even combine Enhance with Eleventy. It'll be exciting to watch as these tools evolve and see how they all fit into or alongside Jamstack development.

— Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's good

Measuring the SSR Performance of Six JS Frameworks - Here's What We Found
A comparison of SSR performance on most of the top full stack JavaScript frameworks. Astro and Sveltekit, two of the newer frameworks, come out on top in many of their measurements. Also worth reading is this comparison of website performance between Gatsby, Next and Nuxt (by Gatsby's cofounder) that looks at HTTP Archive data.

Enterspeed

Databases For Front-End Developers: The Concepts Under The Hood
There are a lot of choices for serverless databases nowadays, and it can be difficult to differentiate them without understanding the concepts. This post (part two in a series) does a good job of laying out the fundamentals of the ecosystem.

Atila Fassina

Is GitHub the Best CMS?
GitHub is, of course, not technically a CMS but it can be used as one, even without tools like Netlify CMS or Forestry. Sean looks at it as a CMS based upon a number of criteria. You can also check out David Large’s series on choosing a CMS for your static site.

Sean C Davis

What Is An Island & Why Is It In My Website?
Rach tries to wrap her head around the concept of “islands architecture” that’s used by tools like Astro, Slinkity and Fresh.

Rach Smith

✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...

  • Next.js 12.3 – Some key features are improved, including fast refresh and auto-install of TypeScript dependencies when a .ts file is used.
  • Astro 1.2.0 – Some key changes include automatically updating the dev server when config changes are made and allowing custom encoding on a route (previously was locked to utf-8).
  • Module Federation for Next.js – A new library that adds support for Module Federation to Next.js applications.
  • ▶ Take Your API from Postman to Production – A step-by-step tutorial showing how to create an API using Postman and a no-code tool called Linx.
  • Next.js Conf – This year's virtual event was just announced and is happening on October 25 at 10:30am PT.

❖ Tidbits

Sharing State Between Frameworks with Astro
You can mix and match the frameworks you use for your components in an Astro app, but how can two different types of framework components share state with each other. Also check out Chris's post on adding React components to Astro.

Chris Bongers

A Complete Guide to Next.js Authentication
A look at the different strategies for user authentication in Next.js as well as a step-by-step showing how to use NextAuth.

Nefe Emadamerho

Get Started with Astro and Redis
A step-by-step guide to building a site using Astro and Svelte components that uses a hosted Redis as the data store behind a simple notes app.

Rodney Johnson

What is a Static Site Generator?
This post does a good job of covering what an SSG does from the perspective of creating a fully pre-rendered site as well as looking at some of the different options available.

David Large

Thanks for reading. — Brian