Berners-Lee said in a talk at the Web Summit recently: “It’s a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they’re doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all.” Berners-Lee and his team are working on the next iteration of the internet, separate from Web3, called Web 3.0, which he says people often confuse with Web3. 

RELATED CONTENT: Web3 and Web 3.0: Two different ideas that can coexist

One conference is happening right now to bring together technologists working on and embracing the next phase of modern web development architecture: Jamstack Conf 2022. At the event, Netlify’s senior data analyst Laurie Voss took the stage for another year to discuss the results of the 2022 Jamstack Community Survey, which backs up Berners-Lee’s doubts. 

In the survey, they asked users how they felt about Web3. About a third of people said they didn’t care, and 13% didn’t even know what it was. The remaining respondents were pretty equally split between positive and negative feelings about it. 

Ninety percent of respondents also said they hadn’t even tried Web3 technologies. He also noted that if a web framework had less than a 4% share, they wouldn’t even track it in the survey. “If we applied the same standard that we apply for web frameworks, you know, do you use it some of the time or most of the time or all of the time, then none of these technologies have cracked 3%,” he said.

The takeaway here is that Web3 is currently very small, and unless something major changes, he doesn’t expect it to grow. 

CMS ecosystem ready for change

Another interesting takeaway is that the content management system (CMS) ecosystem is in a transition period, with WordPress on its way out, but with no clear successor yet. 

The reason Voss says WordPress is at the end of its time is because it has a low satisfaction score among users, which usually means that in coming years, its usage score will also drop.

According to Voss, a satisfaction score under 1.0 means that people are unenthusiastic about a product and usage will likely shrink, while a score over 1.0 indicates people are happy with it and usage is likely to grow. 

While WordPress has a 37% share, which is quite higher than the other CMSs, its satisfaction score is at .5.

“And you would expect that its usage share to be dropping if that was happening,” said Voss. “And that is what has happened. We’ve seen it drop year over year. It’s not collapsing or anything. There’s not a headlong flight from WordPress, but it is slowly deflating, and users are going to other solutions.”

It’s not clear what will take its place, but some possible successors include Sanity, Storyblok, and Strapi, which all have quite high satisfaction scores among their users. 

Native web components are here

Web components that are natively built into browsers are “about to have a good year,” said Voss.

He said that 32% of respondents said they are regular users of native web components, and the satisfaction score is high at 4.3. 

“We are expecting them to get bigger,” he said. “So if you haven’t given it given native web components, now’s the time to give them a spin.”

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According to the company, each of the startups that Netlify has invested in offers a one-of-a-kind technology that works to build the best development experience for the web. 

These companies include Chiselstrike, a prototype-to-production data platform; Clerk, an authentication service purpose-built for Jamstack; Clutch, a Jamstack solution for smaller modern businesses; Convex, a global state management platform; Deno, a modern JavaScript and TypeScript runtime; Everfund, a developer-first nonprofit tool to construct custom fundraising systems; NuxtLabs, an open-source framework for Vue.js; Snaplet, a tool for Postgre databases; TakeShape, a GraphQL API mesh; and Tigris Data, a zero-ops backend for both web and mobile applications. 

The overall goal of the Jamstack Innovation Fund is to invest $10 million in the global, diverse Jamstack ecosystem. 

Netlify provides startups with a $100,000 investment as well as a free startup program that grants access to advisory from industry leaders, product and integration support, and exposure to the full Jamstack community.

“The reception of our fund and program has been better than we could have ever hoped for. The quality of the first batch is outstanding and consists of the most promising new startups of the jamstack ecosystem” said Chris Bach, co-founder and chief strategy and chief creative officer at Netlify. “We’re delighted to support these inventive companies that are shaping the future of the modern web. When the ecosystem wins, we all win.”

Click here to apply for the next round of the Jamstack Innovation Fund.

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But that’s where the web was, not where it’s headed. Today, I’m struck by how little developers need to think about the database at all.

Databases are still very much at the heart of the modern web, just as servers still dutifully power the expanding array of serverless offerings. But it’s today possible—and common—to author and deploy rich, interactive web applications without managing database infrastructure or even knowing how the data is ultimately stored.

RELATED CONTENT: Jamstack brings front-end development back into focus

It’s a shift that’s been in the making: developing directly against the database became less common with the rise of web frameworks like Rails and the ORM. Even with these abstractions, it was still advisable to understand the schema of tables beneath so you could drop down to SQL to optimize critical queries as you tweaked performance. To know your app, you had to know your database.

Breaking the monolith: API services impact the data layer

The mighty, monolithic database and its role as an oracle—as the singular source of truth—is being challenged on two fronts.

The first challenge comes from inside each company as more development teams adopt microservice architectures, structuring each service to focus on a single domain complete with its own datastore. While companies sometimes try building a microservice stack on top of a monolithic database, this tends to be the worst of both worlds. Individual teams still need to own the data layer.

The second challenge to the central database actually comes from outside the company: the explosion of API services — the economy of developer-centric offerings powering everything (payment, search, content authoring, artificial intelligence). The productivity lift from instant access to APIs and services makes the benefits of decoupling an application too large to ignore.

This requires a shift in thinking from “my database” to “my data,” trading direct access to each table for indirect access via APIs. It’s the right tradeoff, even if data spreads across third-party services. Monolithic databases were straining under the weight of additional requirements as applications grew.

A service like Stripe bundles compute and data behind a payment API, managing, scaling, securing and optimizing databases for payment processing in ways that would be out of reach to all but the largest web teams. New “content APIs”—hosted services like Contentful and Sanity—allow entire teams to author all types of content without ever managing a CMS or the database behind it. 

Prioritizing Performance: Making API-centric apps faster with the Jamstack

Querying out to a remote API can be slower than requesting the same data from a database local to the application. However, developers have tackled this problem head-on with a new performance-oriented architecture for the web called the Jamstack.

For years, the web worked like this: as each incoming web request arrives at the server, a response is built by calling application software that fetches the required data with calls out to the database and/or API services. Once the right data is fetched, the html page is assembled and returned. This process is repeated for each and every request. 

Jamstack works differently. Instead of pulling the data at request time, Jamstack reverses the flow. The majority of compute happens ahead of the request cycle. API services use webhooks to notify an automated build process to re-render html pages whenever the data they are storing changes. Prebuilt pages are published out to the edge of the network as close to users as possible. At request time, there’s little left to do but serve the final html.

This “precompute” rendering happens prior to the actual web request made by a visitor. A complex e-commerce page with multiple data sources from multiple APIs can be pre-assembled and still served in milliseconds, with a faster time to first byte than a traditional server. The response can be personalized for each user via Javascript, which may run inside of an edge node on a modern CDN or inside the browser on the user’s device. Developers optimize applications by reaching out for the right data from the right APIs during build time for what can be precomputed or during request time for what is custom to the user.

Querying across APIs 

New API services continue to accelerate new applications being developed. New architectures like the Jamstack are accelerating web applications towards the same level of performance once only enjoyed by native applications.

As we make use of an increasing number of services, we’ll need to guard against fragmentation. It’s now common to have user and authentication data housed in one service, content in another service, and subscriptions in another service, all using different providers. While the variety of services is empowering, underlying vendors will need to be better managed and easier to develop against.

How do we create a unified way of thinking about it? Thankfully, a host of new answers are emerging. In the Jamstack ecosystem, TakeShape, OneGraph, Apollo GraphQL, and Prisma are working on unifying the new generation of data layers. 

Takeaways for web application architects

With all the new services available for instant API consumption, my advice to modern web developer teams: 

1. Embrace the move away from the monolith. Modern apps will be easier to deploy, maintain, and scale than the old monoliths.
2. Start by decoupling the frontend of your application from the backend and use APIs to talk to your own internal services as well as external ones.
3. Performance is everything on the web. Test your application under throttled bandwidth conditions to better approximate real-world usage.
4. Have your architecture do the hard work in advance. Remove as much as possible from the request path by pulling data during the build process so that you can prerender pages into high-performance assets. Services like Netlify help make the Jamstack architecture easy to adopt.
5. Orient your thinking away from the centralized database towards the distributed data layer.

The new mindset about “my data” can help you change the way you build systems. Our answer to that is the Jamstack.

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“Protegrity delivers leading-edge data security and privacy solutions to the world’s largest enterprises across the leading platforms and data stores,” said Allen Holmes, vice president of business development at Yellowbrick Data. “Combined with the power and scale of Yellowbrick’s hybrid cloud data warehouse, enterprises can enjoy faster time to insights without worrying about compromising sensitive data and while also adhering to protection and privacy regulations.”

Yellowbrick offers hybrid cloud data warehouse solutions while Protegrity offers data protection solutions. The collaboration will be a part of Yellowbrick’s mission to build a complete partner ecosystem for the data warehousing industry. 

Netlify announces support for self-hosted GitHub and GitLab repo
According to the company, this new support will unlock Jamstack for enterprise websites and applications. The support will be part of Netlify’s newly announced business plan that comes with advanced security and collaboration features. 

The new enterprise plan includes everything in the business plan plus a custom package of the company’s edge builds and premium support, as well as upfront security and architecture views and ongoing load and penetration testing. 

“Businesses need web applications that load fast, respond instantly, and are easy to update as customer and market dynamics change. Netlify’s platform is uniquely designed to deliver this experience, empowering developer teams to use a modern Jamstack approach alongside legacy web stacks. Our latest updates accelerate development even further and lower the price barrier to use Netlify’s most advanced features at scale,” said Mathias Biilmann, CEO of Netlify. 

Hasura releases the Hasura Cloud
Hasura Cloud is a GraphQL service designed to connect to multi-cloud data sources. The cloud is based on the company’s enterprise-grade Hasura Pro product and provides cloud-specific capabilities including dynamic data caching, auto-scaling, global availability, and consumption-based pricing. 

“Since announcing Hasura Cloud, thousands of people have tried it out and they’re really excited by what they can do with it. Customers really like the autoscaling features and the ability to generate tests based on production data. Quite a few customers are migrating their production workloads to Hasura Cloud and keeping on-site deployments for testing and local development so it’s great to be able to give them this choice and flexibility,” said Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and CEO of Hasura. 

Contentful gives “digital builders” free resources
Free access to the content platform includes new technology features, training and resources that enables digital builds to develop and launch experiences across websites, mobile apps, wearable devices and digital displays. 

“The pandemic has put tremendous pressure on businesses to expand their digital capabilities even more quickly,” said Steve Sloan, CEO of Contentful. “To create the next generation of digital experiences, builders need modern tools and training that makes it easy to learn new technologies. We believe everyone should be able to build without friction, so our new community plan offers free-forever access to the industry’s leading content platform, coupled with a great learning program. This will help more organizations enter the digital-first era with digital-fast capabilities.”

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The survey was conducted by Netlify and received more than 3,000 responses from software development professionals.

RELATED CONTENT: Jamstack brings front-end development back into focus

While 36% of respondents leveraging the Jamstack are newer developers (with 4 years or less of experience),  the survey found 38% of respondents using Jamstack have 8 or more years of experience. 

“The overall picture of the Jamstack is that of a thriving community that is growing fast as a wave of mainstream adoption continues, driven by fantastic scaling, high performance, and workflows and tooling that developers love,” Laurie Voss, senior data analyst at Netlify, wrote in a post. 

The reason for using Jamstack included improving performance, uptime, speed of development, security, and compliance. The top use cases included building consumer software, internal tooling, and enterprise software. 

The survey also asked about the Jamstack tooling ecosystem, and how satisfied developers were with the tools and frameworks available. Respondents revealed using React, Gatsby, Next, Nuxt and 11ty JavaScript frameworks. Additionally, enterprise developers are more likely to use TypeScript than other developers, and GraphQL had the most satisfied users for API protocols.

Other findings included: Jamstack developers are building fully static sites, single page web apps, and fully dynamic sites; a third of respondents using Jamstack have sites that serve millions of users; and 63% of Jamstack developers don’t work at a purely tech company and come from advertising and marketing, education, media, finance and business support industries. 

“With the continued growth of tools and services in this community ecosystem, along with so many powerful web properties redefining how developers can do more with less, the next wave of web development is here, and it’s the Jamstack,” said Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, a modern web development platform provider. 

The post The state of the Jamstack in 2020 appeared first on SD Times.

Traditionally, when front ends are coupled with the back end, developers have to be full-stack experts and be able to build a full-stack solution, according to Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a web development solution provider. “In some ways what was happening was you weren’t getting your cake and eating it too because the back end wasn’t strong enough and the front end was quite limited,” said Rauch.

Further, a website that required a web server constantly running to deliver a program often led to site lag times, and left the system more open for attack, according to Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, a modern web development platform provider. 

This development conundrum is now being addressed with a new rising development and architectural approach called Jamstack, which comes with the promise of providing faster, more accessible, more maintainable and globally available websites and applications.  

Jamstack stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup. The term was created by Netlify in 2015, but has recently been gaining more traction. “We coined the term ‘Jamstack’ in 2015 to better define what developers were already starting to do – decouple the front- and back-end web and apps, focus on best practices of speed and availability, and redefine their workflows,” Biilmann explained. 

According to Biilmann, as organizations have moved away from monolithic architectures to microservices, there has been a natural separation between the front end and the back end, enabling developers to focus on building that front-end layer and owning the whole life cycle around it. 

“As the web has progressed and the demands on the experiences we are building and the devices we are reaching have gone up, we have had to build layers of abstractions that take some of the complexity away and makes it possible for a developer to work without considering those lower layers of the stack. That has been one of the driving forces behind the idea of the Jamstack,” Biilmann said in a keynote at this year’s Jamstack Conference.

Jamstack leverages pre-rendering to help developers build faster websites, aims to provide a more secure infrastructure with fewer points of attack, is able to scale through global delivery, and speed up the development and deployment cycle.

“This idea is that the stack has moved up a little. We have transcended from thinking about the stack in terms of the specific programming language we use on the server, from the web server we run on, or from the specific database and instead [we are] thinking at the layer of what gets delivered to the end users in terms of pre-built markup, in terms of the JavaScript that runs directly in the browser, and in terms of these APIs we have access to. By doing this, we are able to let developers focus on building websites instead of focusing on infrastructure and we are able to make the performance part of the platform itself instead of making it something that developers have to have,” Biilmann said. 

The rise of mobile has also contributed to the rise of Jamstack. “We saw the web reimagined for mobile apps. If you think about Spotify, no one thinks they should be downloading it every time they use it and at the same time no one thinks that they would be downloading all the music in the world on their phone either. There would be no room. You download the app, but you speak to a service to stream the music. That was what we saw the web would need in order to be viable and fight back,” Chris Bach, president and co-founder of Netlify, said.

While the Jamstack is not focused on specific technologies, it does provide a “prescription” for building web applications. Any project that tightly couples the client side with servers is not considered Jamstack. Some examples of this would be a site built with server-side CMS, a single-page app with isomorphic rendering, and a monolithic server-run web app relying on a back-end language. 

“It is almost saying abide by this protocol and you are going to build a great website or a great application,” Vercel’s Rauch said. 

Those protocols include:

1. Decoupling from the back end to allow the front end to be freely deployed globally, directly to a CDN
2. Prebuilding pages into static pages and assets
3. Leveraging APIs to take to back-end services

Often, a misunderstanding is that the static pages Jamstack delivers are flat and boring, but Vercel’s Rauch explained since you pre-render the page and attach JavaScript to it, when the visitor visits the page, JavaScript gets executed and the page comes to life. 

“I tend to compare the Jamstack to the printing press,” Rauch explained. “The main idea is that you pre-render pages and then you distribute them throughout a global CDN, meaning you only do the computation once. When you think about printing your page and then being able to very cheaply and quickly duplicate it throughout the entire world, the server costs go down because you did the work of printing the page once and were able to clone it all over the world. That also means you can clone it right where the visitor is.” 

Rauch continued, “Front end is the largest place for reinvention for companies. A lot of investment has gone into back-end technology and boring infrastructure, low-level technologies. What we noticed is there has been an under-investment or under-appreciation of the technology that is actually closer to the customer.” 

Netlify’s Biilmann believes just as LAMP stack, (Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and PHP) is no longer used as a term to create websites and web applications, Jamstack will eventually just become the way of doing things and won’t need to be referred to as the Jamstack anymore. 

“The Jamstack is going to succeed in a way where in a number of years we will stop calling it Jamstack because it will just be the way websites are built,” he said. 

Jamstack defined
Jamstack is a front-end development approach for modern web development.  “Jamstack was born of the stubborn conviction that there was a better way to build for the web. Around 2014, developers started to envision a new architecture that could make web apps look a lot more like mobile apps: built in advance, distributed, and connected directly to powerful APIs and microservices. It would take full advantage of modern build tools, Git workflows, new front-end frameworks, and the shift from monolithic apps towards decoupled front ends and back ends,” Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, wrote in an ebook about Jamstack. 

The ‘J-A-M’ in Jamstack stands for:

JavaScript: Going beyond just the programming language, the Jamstack leverages JavaScript’s advanced constructs, object syntax, variations and compilers. In addition to JavaScript, Jamstack solutions can be built with PHP, Ruby, Python and other languages. According to Netlify, it’s not about a collection of specific software and technologies, rather it is a set of best practices. 

APIs: These enable the front end to be separated from the back end, allowing for more modular development and the ability to leverage third-party tools.

Markup: Prebuilt markup enables websites to be delivered as static HTML files, which provides faster performance. 

According to Netlify, some best Jamstack practices are: 

• Service the entire project directly from a CDN
• Put everything into Git to reduce contributor friction and simplify staging and testing workflows
• Take advantage of modern build tools such as Babel, PostCSS, and Webpack
• Automate builds using webhooks or a publishing platform
• Use atomic deploys to hold live changes until all changed files are uploaded
• Ensure your CDN can handle instant cache invalidation so you know “when a deploy went live, it really went live.”

Jamstack vs serverless
It is common for developers to get Jamstack and serverless mixed up because Jamstack is a subset of serverless. Since Jamstack focuses on front-end development that is decoupled from the back end, it doesn’t require or depend on a server. 

“With the Jamstack, complex, monolithic applications could now be disassembled into small, independent components that are easier to parse and understand. The introduction of serverless and the emergence of the API further cemented the Jamstack as the perfect paradigm for building streamlined, and lightweight applications that scaled efficiently,” Divya Tagtachian, developer advocate at Netlify, wrote in a post.

According to Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a web development solution provider, serverless is just such a vague term, while the Jamstack is more prescriptive. 

“With Jamstack, it tells you to pre-render markup, use JavaScript on the client side and query an API. If I tell you to build a website using serverless, you would look at me like ‘what are you talking about?’ When it comes down to building an application, I like to tell people how to actually do it, so I am a big fan of betting on Jamstack,” he explained.

Colby Fayock, a front-end engineer and UX designer, added that while Jamstack and serverless do have many similarities and philosophies, not all Jamstack apps are always going to be a serverless app. 

“Consider an app hosted in static storage on the cloud provider of your choice. Yes, you might be serving the app in a serverless way, but you might be dealing with an API that utilizes WordPress or Rails, both of which are certainly not serverless,” Fayock wrote in a post. “Combining these philosophies can go a long way, but they shouldn’t be confused as the same.”

The post Jamstack brings front-end development back into focus appeared first on SD Times.

Vercel, which was previously known as ZEIT, was founded by the creators of the Next.js framework. The company changed its name to align with its new focus of providing the “ultimate workflow for developing, previewing and shipping Jamstack sites,” and bridge the gap between development feedback and release.

The Jamstack architecture refers to JavaScript, APIs, and markup. According to Guillermo Rauch, co-founder of Vercel, Jamstack has enabled the frontend to be split from the backend to make site development even faster and independent. Vercel aims to provide a workflow that enables an all-in-one solution for static and Jamstack deployment as well as serverless functions and global CDN. Some of its features include the ability to work out of the box with any web framework, the ability to collaborate with others, automatic SSL, and simple deployments. Recent updates to the platform include simpler pricing, environment variables UI, and cancelable deployments. 

“Projects that once took months to develop, are getting completed by lean teams of frontend engineers and designers in days. These teams want to iterate rapidly, and collaboratively. They want to develop, preview, and ship at the speed of thought. They don’t want to leave their browsers, and other tools they’re already working with. That’s where we come in,” the team wrote in a blog post. 

“Front end developers want to create amazing experiences for users, not wrestle with complexities of configuring servers, clusters, compilers, and build systems,” added Rauch. “We saw an opportunity to re-think the entire workflow for the world’s 11 million JavaScript developers, to give them superior developer experience, and to give their users the best performance on the web.”

The Series A round of funding was led by Accel, CRV, with additional investors such as React creator Jordan Walke, and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. 

“Because of its impact on customer experience, the front end is becoming much more important. Vercel re-imagines the front end using modern serverless architecture and leading frameworks. Their workflow seamlessly orchestrates code, hosting, testing, and collaboration into a simple, unified experience. Vercel brings huge advantages to front end teams that move fast and ship code frequently,” said Dan Levine, partner at Accel. 

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