Last week, the Jamstack community came together for a day of presentations highlighting the current state of the web and which direction they (presenters) think it will go in the future.
Matt Biilman, CEO of Netlify, kicked off the event with a keynote of his own, titled 'Jamstack: How it started, and how it's going'. In his presentation, Biilman speaks to the evolution of the web, and how it's impacted how developers approach building fast and secure web applications.
The one presentation that really grabbed my attention was delivered by Rich Harris, software developer from the NYT and creator of Svelte. Harris's presentation examined the dicotomy between multi page apps vs single page apps and which methodology is better. The TLDR version is they both have drawbacks - MPAs, while being Server Rendered and accessible, can have its own set of DX drawbacks as well as having to load JS on each page. SPAs come with the popular component based architecture and state management tools that make developer's lives better, but the SEO, poor initial page load performance and JS bloat surely aren't the answer either. The one undeniable fact, Harris argues, is that Javascript isn't going anywhere. He took time to highlight the merits of Hotwire (HTML over the wire), while also tempering expectations of what it promises to be.
It feels like a very exciting time to be part of this jamstack community.Some of the newer frameworks and philosophies are merried to performance. The question that's being asked is essentially how can we optimize and ship the right amount of javascript without loading 100s of kbs of boilerplate with each project?