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0 pointsalehlopeh3y ago0 comments

Forgive my digression but for years I’ve seen small efforts here and there to elevate the concept of a “stack” and promote it as the level abstraction to use when discussing web apps and the like. What’s up with that?

Grab any 3 commonly used pieces of technology whose names can be used to form a fun initialism, append stack to the end, and soon there will be experts speaking at conferences dedicated to it. JamStack is an example you mentioned. I’ve heard others over the years.

I disagree that it’s a useful unit of thought. No one I know or work with ever talks about “web stacks” this way. Am I missing something here? Is this just some kind of niche? Who’s marketing these?

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ameliaquining3y ago

Jamstack in particular is not really an example of that; it is more of a kind of architecture than a specific stack, in that it doesn't prescribe the use of specific software. An architecture where all the HTML/CSS/JS is precompiled statically for maximum cacheability, and server-side dynamic behavior happens exclusively within AJAX calls that return structured data, is a natural kind, and useful to have a term for so that we can compare and contrast it to other ways of building web apps.

More broadly, other acronym stacks are a thing because complementary technologies cluster together, especially in relatively immature ecosystems. E.g., PHP traditionally had better support for mySQL than for competing databases, so if you were building an app in PHP, you probably used mySQL for data storage. These effects may have weakened over time as the graph of ecosystem integrations has grown more complete (and indeed I feel like I hear less about acronym stacks these days than I did half a decade ago), but I don't think they've died out entirely.

int_19h3y ago

The reason why PHP was bundled with MySQL historically is not so much because it had better support for it, but rather because cheap & free hosting would generally offer MySQL (rather than, say, Postgres) - because it was easier for them. If SQLite showed up a bit earlier, I bet that would have become the standard.

solardev3y ago

What else would you call the well, stack, of technologies used to host a website? It's not a marketing term, just a way to describe the multiple layers. From hardware to network routing to DNS to tcp/up to http to https to HTML to JS to workers, and also Linux and PHP and a web server like Apache or nginx and a database like Maria or Postgres and maybe a cache like Redis or memcached and maybe squid and Varnish in front of it... that's a stack.

Jamstack is just a particular configuration where vendors take care of all of that and you can push up frontend code that auto deploys and that's that. I used to have to manage the whole stack and now can work purely in HTML CSS and JS and it is a DREAM. That's the magic of the Jamstack. Less devops and network infrastructure, more time to focus on UX and DX.

As for vendors, there's Vercel, Netlify, Gatsby, maybe a few others. Cloudflare, Deno, and Fly, Render and a few others have similar variations.

It's a really nice way to work...

megous3y ago

It's been around since forever. Things like LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), etc.

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