Pure JAM Stack

What is the JAM Stack really, and what does it mean for front end Javascript developers? And no, it’s not a dessert.

The Definition

A JAM Stack application is “An application that uses only the core building block of JS, APIs, and Markup”. By its strictest definition, it is a serverless JS application plus an additional requirement that further increases efficiency — HTML markup is generated during build time only. During build, data is fetched via API request for each page, and HTML is subsequently hydrated with data and saved in the bundled production version. Every page can be served statically.

You might be thinking, that sounds like a pretty restrictive platform on which to build an application — what if I need user login, or to save comment data on the site? What if I want to sell things on the internet? And that’s true, in reality there are very few applications that are actually pure JAM Stack. The only sites that can afford to be are online documentation pages, or other truly static sites.

But that’s ok. the JAM stack is meant to be an ideal, not a strict opinionated framework. What that means is that you should start from the perspective of thinking about how you can move as much of your application to be statically rendered and cached, and then what you can’t, you can use JS and JSON APIs to handle. Need ecommerce? there’s an API for that. Need to store data in a serverless mongo DB? There’s an API for that too.