Static vs. Dynamic vs. Jamstack: Where’s The Line?

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You’ll often hear developers talking about “static” vs. “dynamic” sites, or you may have heard someone use the term Jamstack. What do these terms mean, and when does a “static” site become either a Jamstack or dynamic site? These questions sound simple, but they’re more nuanced than they appear. Let’s explore these terms to gain a deeper understanding of Jamstack.

Finding the line

What’s the difference between a chair and a stool? Most people will respond that a chair has four legs and back support, whereas a stool has three legs with no back support.

OK, that’s a great starting point, but what about these?

The more stool-like a chair becomes, the fewer people will unequivocally agree that it’s a chair. Eventually, we’ll reach a point where most people agree it’s a stool rather than a chair. It may sound like a silly exercise, but if we want to have a deep appreciation of what it means to be a chair, it’s a valuable one. We find out where the limits of a chair are for most people. We also build an understanding of the gray area beyond. Eventually, we get to the point where even the biggest die-hard chair fans concede and admit there’s a stool in front of them.

As interesting as chairs are, this is an article about website delivery technology. Let’s perform this same exercise for static, dynamic, and Jamstack websites.

At a high level

When you go to a website in your browser, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes:

1. Your browser performs a DNS lookup to turn the domain name into an IP address.
2. It requests an HTML file from that IP address.
3. The webserver sends back the requested file.
4. As the browser renders the web page, it may come across a reference for an asset, such as a CSS, JavaScript, or image file. The browser then performs a request for this asset.
5. This cycle continues until the browser has all the files for the web page. It’s not unusual for a single webpage to make 50+ requests.

For every request, the response from the webserver is always a static file, even on a dynamic website. You could save these files to a USB drive, email them to a friend just like any other file on your computer.

When comparing static and dynamic, we’re talking about what the webserver is doing. On a static site, the files the browser requests already exist on the webserver. The webserver sends them back exactly as they are. On a dynamic site, the response gets generated by software. This software might connect to a database to retrieve data, build a layout from template files, and add today’s date to the footer. It does all of this for every request.

That’s the foundational difference between static and dynamic websites.

Where does Jamstack fit in?

Static websites are restrictive. They’re great for informational websites; however, you can’t have any dynamic content or behavior by definition. Jamstack blurs the line between static and dynamic. The idea is to take advantage of all the things that make static websites awesome while enabling dynamic functionality where necessary.

The ‘stack’ in Jamstack is a misnomer. The truth is, Jamstack is not a stack at all. It’s a philosophy that exhibits a striking resemblance to The 5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The ambiguity in the term has led to extensive community discussion about what it means to be Jamstack.

What is Jamstack?

Jamstack is a superset of static. But to truly understand Jamstack, let’s start with the seeds that led to the coining of the term.

In 2002, the late Aaron Swartz published a blog post titled “Bake, Don’t Fry.” While Aaron didn’t coin “Bake, Don’t Fry,” it’s the first time I can find someone recognizing the benefits of static websites while breaking out perceived constraints of the word.

I care about not having to maintain cranky AOLserver, Postgres and Oracle installs. I care about being able to back things up with scp. I care about not having to do any installation or configuration to move my site to a new server. I care about being platform and server independent.

If we trawl through history, we can find similar frustrations that led to Jamstack seeds:

• Ben and Mena Trott created MovableType because of a [d]issatisfaction with existing blog CMSes — performance, stability.

• Tom Preston-Werner created Jekyll to move away from complexity:

  I already knew a lot about what I didn’t want. I was tired of complicated blogging engines like WordPress and Mephisto. I wanted to write great posts, not style a zillion template pages, moderate comments all day long, and constantly lag behind the latest software release.

• Steve Francia created Hugo for performance:

  The past few years this blog has [been] powered by wordpress [sic] and drupal prior to that. Both are are fine pieces of software, but over time I became increasingly disappointed with how they are both optimized for writing content even though significantly most common usage is reading content. Due to the need to load the PHP interpreter on each request it could never be considered fast and consumed a lot of memory on my VPS.

The same themes surface as you look at the origins of many early Jamstack tools:

• Reduce complexity
• Improve performance
• Reduce vendor lock-in
• Better workflows for developers

In the past 20 years, JavaScript has evolved from a language for adding small interactions to a website to becoming a platform for building rich web applications in the browser. In parallel, we’ve seen a movement of splitting large applications into smaller microservices. These two developments gave rise to a new way of building websites where you could have a static front-end decoupled from a dynamic back-end.

In 2015, Mathias Biilmann wanted to talk about this modern way of building websites but was struggling with the constricting definition of static:

We were in this space of modern static websites. That’s a really bad description of what we’re doing, right? And we kept having that problem that, talking to people about static sites, they would think about something very static. They would think about a brochure or something with no moving parts. A little one-pager or something like that.

To break out of these constraints, he coined the term “Jamstack” to talk about this new approach, and it caught on like wildfire. What was old static technology from the 90s became new again and pushed to new limits. Many developers caught on to the benefits of the Jamstack approach, which helped Jamstack grow into the thriving ecosystem it is today.

Aaron Swartz put it nicely, 13 years before Jamstack was coined: keep a strict separation between input (which needs dynamic code to be processed) and output (which can usually be baked). In other words, decouple the front end from the back end. Prerender content whenever possible. Layer on dynamic functionality where necessary. That’s the crux of Jamstack.

The reason you might want to build a Jamstack site over a dynamic site come down to the six pillars of Jamstack:

Chris touches on some of these points in a deep-dive comparison between Jamstack and WordPress. He also compares the reasons for choosing a Jamstack architecture versus a server-side one in “Static or Not?”.

Let’s use these pillars to evaluate Jamstack use cases.

Where is the edge of static and Jamstack?

Now that we have the basics of static and Jamstack, let’s dive in and see what lies at the edge of each definition. We have four categories each edge case can fall under.

• Static – This strictly adheres to the definition of static.
• Basically static – While not precisely static, most people would call it a static site.
• Jamstack – A static frontend decoupled from a dynamic backend.
• Dynamic – Renders web pages on-demand.

Many of these use cases can be placed in multiple categories. In this exercise, we’re putting them in the most restrictive category they fit.

The lines have been drawn

Exploring and debating these edge cases gives us a better understanding of the limits of all of these terms. The point of this exercise isn’t to be dogmatic about creating static or Jamstack websites. It’s to give us a common language to talk about the tradeoffs you make as you cross the boundary from one concept to another.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with tradeoffs either. Not everything can be a purely static website. In many cases, the trade-offs make sense. For example, let’s say the front end needs to know the country of the visitor. There are two ways to do this:

1. On page load, perform an Ajax call to query the country from an API. (Jamstack)
2. Use an edge function to dynamically insert a country code into the HTML on response. (Dynamic)

If having the country code is a nice-to-have and the web page doesn’t need it immediately, then the first approach is a good option. The page can be static and the API call can fail gracefully if it doesn’t work. However, if the country code is required for the page, dynamically adding it using an edge function might make more sense. It’ll be faster as you don’t need to perform a second request/response cycle.

The key is understanding the problem you’re solving and thinking through the trade-offs you’re making with different approaches. You might end up with the majority of your site Jamstack and a portion dynamic. That’s totally fine and might be necessary for your use case. Typically, the closer you can get to static, the faster, more secure, and more scalable your site will be.

This is only the beginning of the discussion, and I’d love to hear your take. Where would you draw the lines? What do static and Jamstack mean to you? Are you sitting on a chair or stool right now?

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