Though I think its part natural evolution of how web apps are built - it makes sense that common web apps functionality (like auth, database, email, etc) would be commoditized as services. I don't see that as a bad thing, especially since there is a lot of open source software (RoR, Django) that commoditizes and standardizes those aspects anyway.
JAMStack also has the side benefit of encouraging developers to focus on the business value of the software they are building, rather than the underlying plumbing.
At the same time, I think there's true advantages to this approach, so long as you do things right and don't fall into the traps of paying through the nose for things that should be cheap. cough Netlify form handling.
The challenge for Netlify (and my own business as well) is finding a way to capitalise on static sites, so often they will decide on some arbitrary metric and restrict that.
So, while I think the term jamstack may go away, I feel the idea behind static sites probably won't. To be able to make a whole shop, including financial transactions, without a DB in sight is quite appealing imo.
Just don't get suckered into the walled gardens / closed ecosystems out there.
If using something like snipcart, you can then have a whole shop without you yourself having to maintain or admin a DB, it's all managed by a third party. They do, however, still maintain a DB themselves.
For my product I am planning to create a Stripe-based shop-module, which would allow anyone to create a shop using their own Stripe credentials. This would require some API calls coordinated by our own server and therefore some DB entries, at which point the sites cannot be considered pure readonly from our side.
All of this reminds me of the horrible misnomer 'serverless'...it's servers everywhere. And even the whole 'without DB' moniker doesn't hold up if things get a bit more involved. Maybe ultimately it's worth calling it the "let's try to keep sites as static and readonly as possible"-stack ;)
Thanks for the observation!
Sometimes avoiding the cloud services is the right decision, and I think many architectures are overly complicated based on current and prospective performance requirements (cargo cult infrastructure/architecture), but used properly they save many thousands of hours of engineering time.
Last year we started at work a project with plain old Rails. This year we started using stimulus and turbo. You cannot believe how much our lives have improved. Things are so easy and feel so solid. Everything has documentation, things don't change every other day. Patterns are clear, libraries well tested, we focus 99.9% on actual business problems.
Two members of the team left because they wanted to react node monorepos all the things. It's. South they left, but overall we are so much happier and more productive now, even with two members less (team of 6).
I really wish the pendulum swings back, as they say, and we stop this madness. At least for the 95% use cases that don't need to be an SPA with a Go backend for google scale.
But remember GWT ? I work in one Europe largest bank , the majority of internal apps are written in GWT.
In the 2010 era this trend was at its peak.[0]
Some members of the teams decided that they should « invest » in GWT because this would be the future.
Here we are 10 years laters , GWT is a deprecated legacy framework and developers have been burned out by this strategy.
For Jamstack the same will happen , the hype is reaching its peak and is going to come down as developers and businesses realize it doesn’t actually solve anything from their actual problems.
But in the process, people who are selling « Jamstack » books probably made a fortune. Same thing for GWT...
It's a methodology for building websites in a particular way using an enormously diverse set of tools and platforms. Comparing it to GWT is not correct.
I've never had any special difficulties hiring Ruby/Rails devs. Quality is high, availability is reasonable (hiring is always something of a struggle!). My first Rails hire was in 2003 (rails-0.8, IIRC) and my most recent was about 6 months ago.
That's 17 years, and counting.
OTOH, I've never had a good time hiring people to maintain EOLed apps. Ruby or otherwise. "Sustaining Engineering" is a (misnamed) trade that isn't as broadly attractive as new development.
From my point of view, the "JAMStack" is nothing more than a piece of jargon used to aggregate various "good" ways of building and deploying web applications to trick non-technical business people or entry-level developers into using their services.
There's an absurd amount of money and effort currently being spent marketing this term.
Whatever it is, it's ephemeral, and I recommend anyone to avoid spending time on this unless they want to fall into another marketing funnel.