Welcome to the JAMstack Era (Part 1)

Introduction

Over the past five to ten years, there has been a wholesale reorientation occurring for the enterprise. Digital has been the enabler for much of this action, but the real driver has been a change in practices that puts the customer at the center of the business relationship.

In this new paradigm, being able to connect and engage with customers instantly becomes paramount, as does the need for fast feedback loops that allow product feature development and iteration.

IT systems have been going through a modernization process to meet these requirements, resulting in new architectural design patterns and infrastructure models including the use of multi-cloud providers and more composable, component-driven software development.

On an organizational front, enterprises have employed more developers and are now competing for top talent, while also needing to reach new productivity gains rather than getting swamped in the complexity of too many autonomous teams.

This modernization process has also allowed businesses to connect to different systems through APIs, giving rise to an API economy in which external capabilities can be plugged into a company’s IT infrastructure. APIs also allow a business to create new mobile and digital products faster by reusing these components each time.

Customer expectations for product and feature development have also grown. Businesses need to have responsive websites that load fast and offer instant functionality. This has given rise to single-page applications and edge networks that allow caching of content close to customers.

The JAMstack (a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup) leverages these modernized IT systems and increased developer workforces to create always-on, highly performant web products.

JAMstack is all about workflow

WebriQ has opted to work exclusively with Netlify to give marketers, content writers, and content editors the right tools to seamlessly perform tasks within the workflow.

Using a Dev/Build/Edge platform approach, Netlify harnesses the power of the JAMstack to create a simplified and streamlined continuous delivery workflow so that there is always a single-point-of-truth for web products, including those in development and review.

Content and code are drawn from git repositories during the build process. Pre-rendered web products are then deployed to edge networks so that they are instantly accessible to customers as needed.

The JAMstack gives enterprises the superpowers they need to effectively compete and meet customer demands in a digital era.

While Netlify provides the edge infrastructure you need, it is the JAMstack that gives your CTOs, CIOs, and CMOs the superpowers to become force-10 multipliers, driving your enterprise’s customer relationships and revenue opportunities.

How WebriQ GLUE and Netlify Superpower Your Enterprise

Talent attraction WebriQ has a large pool of talent that has extensive experience in the JAMstack. This deters a costly learning curve. Being built on a modern stack, enterprises are better able to recruit and retain additional development talent, if and when required. Dreaded platforms like Drupal and Wordpress are avoided, and DevOps is basically outsourced to Netlify and WebriQ.

Velocity Enterprises can outpace competitors. Digital innovation can come to markets faster, and new ideas can be tested in production without impacting a monolithic codebase. Changes are easily rolled back if requiring further iteration. New web products can be spun up quickly and successful features from one deployment can be instantly applied across a product suite.

Collaborative The workflow hierarchy includes the opportunity to preview prototypes that share exact replicas of how the product is rendered online or on mobile and can be discussed before sign off. This occurs within the workflow. Developers get real feedback about their work without having to incorporate comments made on multiple versions of their drafts in staging environments.

How the JAMstack is being used today

Netlify is a new type of edge service infrastructure provider that replaces and enhances the role that a content delivery network would usually play.

The Application Delivery Network is a continuous delivery build process and edge service delivery network that pulls content and data assets from your cloud services; deploys a build process to prerender web pages, and then pushes them to edge service nodes so that your web products are instantly accessible to your customers, wherever and whenever they want. Netlify replaces production servers, staging servers, deployment systems, and CDN caching.

To compete and stay relevant, today’s enterprises need development tools and development teams with superpowers in scalability, security, and speed. In the JAMstack approach, teams are empowered to achieve business goals, not technical goals. Your products will be available for a national and even global audience. You can also manage your websites as products at the edge, to ensure round-the-clock, instant availability.

All enterprises need to produce products more quickly and maintain products that showcase new customer offerings. That is exactly what the JAMstack can do. Your web properties are no longer a project, but a product. That product should be treated like any other product or service you sell to your customers.

Utilizing the JAMstack approach reduces complexity and cultivates a sense of dynamism and ownership amongst the entire team; • Designers and writers can concentrate on creating engaging content. • Developers can focus on building website products without managing servers or monolithic code bases. • Architects and security managers can ensure streamlined workflows and focus on fewer security risk overheads.

A deep dive into the JAMstack: Optimizing your toolchain for competitive advantage

The JAMstack is a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup.

It represents an evolution of best practices in building and delivering always-on, highly performant, instantly accessible digital products to a globally distributed customer base.

As a stack of technologies, the JAMstack is supported by a maturing ecosystem of service providers that allow businesses to manage sites and web applications as products that draw in traffic, create digital experiences, and convert visitors into customers.

There are three components, and each component has its best-in-breed players:

• JavaScript: Any dynamic programming during the request/response cycle is handled by JavaScript, running entirely on the front-end, that is, your website or application.

• APIs: All backend processes are routed through APIs: either custom-built ones to access your server-side components such as your databases or to third parties to deliver specific services such as identity controls or form data collection.

• Markup: Markup is used to create prebuilt templates that are used with a static site generator or build tool to create content sites and web applications at deployment. This allows more instantaneous loading when a customer visits your webpages and applications, which in turn means it is rated more highly for search engines because of the quick response times, as well as keeping customers engaged with your product rather than jumping off to a faster site.

A JAMstack approach leverages the advantages of using the same toolchain across all projects so that repetitive work is diminished and the integration of individual projects into a cohesive architecture is streamlined.

The WebriQ JAMStack Application

WebriQ has been building Jamstack websites for almost four years and is considered as one of the pioneers in using the JAMStack in commercial deployments. With over 250 projects under our belt, we are an experienced team of developers solely focused on JAMStack websites, web applications and progressive web applications (PWA).

One of the challenges of the JAMStack is that the stack is not monolithic, so there are many various frameworks, Static Site generators, publishing platforms, APIs and automation to choose. It kind of needs to be glued together with some initial choices to be made at the start of each project.

WebriQ has made these fundamental choices for you:

• A GIT based workflow
• React-based Static Site Generator (GatsbyJS)
• A headless CMS approach with Sanity
• Micro and serverless services for Forms and other interactive applications
• Most common APIs available from services like Algolia, Stripe etc.
• Netlify for builds and publishing websites and web application

All our expertise has been bundled into a React-based WEB APPLICATION. Through the WebriQ APP, you can: Provision any JAMStack website

• Change code on any JAMStack website through a GIT workflow
• Content manage and update any JAMStack website
• Publish any JAMStack website through Netlify
• ADD serverless Forms to any JAMStack website
• ADD an SSL certificate to any JAMStack website
• ADD collaborators (like editors or developers) to any JAMStack website
• Redirect your JAMStack to multiple Top Level Domains
• Track your web visitors through integrated WebriQ analytics