Earlier this week, Matt Mullenweg and Matt Biilmann squared off in a “fireside chat” about Jamstack vs. WordPress…which got pretty fiery! The official video isn’t yet released, but I had the transcript and so here’s my writeup.
My latest column: JAMstack vs. WordPress: which is the future of web architecture? For insights into that question, I spoke with Stackbit CEO (and Netlify board member) Ohad Eder-Pressman. We also discussed his wager with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.
“JAMstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it,” WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg told me for my column this week. He questions the usability and functionality of JAMstack, and says it is a fragile chain of services.
In this week’s column, I spoke with Gatsby Chief Technology Officer Sam Bhagwat about its approach to content in the cloud native era. I also wanted to peel back the layers of the JAMstack ecosystem and clarify Gatsby’s place in it.
Just as Docker was the original change agent for the containers revolution, a single company was behind the JAMstack movement: Netlify. So I reached out to Netlify’s co-founder and CEO Matt Biilmann, to talk about Netlify’s journey so far and its current place in the developer ecosystem.
Source: Why Netlify Is Tech Agnostic and Its Role in JAMstack Development
It’s taken a while for the JAMstack terminology to sink in, compared to how I have used web publishing terminology throughout my career (dating back to the 90s). Here’s how I currently see my “stack,” with key terminology in italics:
a) I use Hugo as my framework; aka it’s my Static Site Generator. (Another framework I’m familar with at this point is Gatsby.) So when I start a new post, such as this one you’re reading now, I type this into my terminal:
Lambros Petrou, Software Engineer at Facebook and ex-AWS, has a good post comparing Netlify, Vercel and AWS as jamstack platforms:
If you focus only on Jamstack applications, my recommendation would be to go with Vercel. It has amazing performance, and the zero-config approach really does wonders for the majority of the popular frameworks. Recommending Next.js for one more time 😃If you are going to find uses for Netlify’s add-ons, then it’s a great choice as well!
Servers are not going away, but they are moving around and hiding. Static Site Generation (SSG) can be thought of moving around the servers and taking them away from the hot path. Instead of putting a server in between the user’s request and the response, we compute the response ahead of time.
Guillermo Rauch
