No. Not really it is going to be JAM Stack as per my view. JAM Stack has a Static Site Generator but when Static Site Generator alone is not JAM Stack application. In JAM Stack application there will be JavaScript running at the browser to interact with data provided by APIs.
JavaScript+APIs+Static Site Generator = JAM Stack Application
But it is not the view of the JAMStack.org. It defines JAM Stack as follows
Fast and secure sites and apps delivered by pre-rendering files and serving them directly from a CDN, removing the requirement to manage or run web servers.
They don't need to use APIs to be called JAMStack site. Below are the quotes from the web site.
Pre-rendered sites can be enhanced with JavaScript and the growing capabilities of browsers and services available via APIs.You may have already seen or worked on a Jamstack site! They do not have to include all attributes of JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. They might be built using sites built by hand, or with Jekyll, Hugo, Nuxt, Next, Gatsby, or another static site generator...
Welcome to my experiments with JAM Stack.
One of my previous posts was about "Why I am still with Blogger than going behind static site generators" (hereafter SSGs). There I mentioned why the SSGs are not good for blogs from my perspective. Still in the same opinion but when I considered my personal web site https://joymononline.in I feel that can be a candidate for SSGs aka JAMStack.
The current state of JoymonOnline.in site
Though it started as ASP.Net application, said bye to server-side code execution in 2017 itself. Now it is an AngularJS application served from GitHub pages. Some APIs are invoked from browser-side JavaScript to get list of projects from GitHub and recent blog posts from Blogger.
Problems
Keeping updatable contents
The home page has a section called What's new. When I added this area, my idea was to make it live as possible as twitter. But it is difficult to update frequently. I tried storing the content in Evernote, and later tried to keep in GitHub itself and dealt with its API limits. Later I decided to keep it with the HTML itself thinking I will modify it and the CI/CD will push automatically when I get full code coverage. But still, it was difficult keeping it up to date.
Client-side API calls
As I mentioned above, we may hit with API limits as every consumer has to call the API from their browser. The GitHub API throttle by the client IP address if there is no API key. The people from a company often access the internet from a single outbound IP address. It gets throttled very quickly.
Sometimes they may not have access to certain API endpoints. For example, some companies may block access to Blogger and GitHub to make sure their employees are not publishing the company code and proprietary code/algorithms. Don't laugh it happened. They access my web site but not able to see some contents.
Testing efforts
When we code any application using any technology such an AngularJS in this case, we need to test our code. Though it is not a banking application, I will feel I need to test my personal web site before publishing. As everybody agrees, it is difficult and not practical to manually test. So started automated tests. Researched different frameworks for unit and integration tests.
Things were good until the million-dollar question triggered in my mind. Am I getting 100% code coverage? The integration tests often fail due to timing, when I just rerun it works!! May be my poor scripting skills. Overall its trouble maintaining our own code.
Technology upgrade
There are many things such as upgrading technology. Now AngularJS is getting out of support and converting to Angular is like writing from scratch.
The JAM Stack JoymonOnline.in
I don't think all the problems will be solved if I use JAM Stack for https://joymononline.in. But its an experiment to see how it takes to convert an AngularJS application to JAM Stack. I never used SSGs extensively for any of my projects. Of course, the GitHub documentation uses SSG internally. The DotNet.Helpers library uses DocFx to generate its API reference and documentation. It is SSG. But still not aware of the capabilities of JAM Stack technologies. So it would be learning to me as well on JAM Stack
Plan
The plan is very simple to convert my site joymononline.in into 3 leading SSGs. Below are the SSGs I am planning
Below are the things considered
- No look and feel changes.
- All existing pages and adding one more page to show my YouTube videos.
- If possible no API calls from the client-side. Everything to be generated at the server. Includes GitHub projects, recent blog posts, etc...
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