I learnt a new web development term today: the JAM Stack. Yes, it has a silly name. JAM stands for JavaScript, APIs, Markup; the idea being that you serve up only static JS/HTML (preferably heavily cached and distributed through a CDN), and make use of APIs to do all the interactive work. Very nice, in theory.

Everything old is new again. When I first started dabbling in creating stuff for the web, everything was “static”. Then we had cgi-bin, scripting languages, server-side whatever, huge web applications many layers deep, and now we’ve come around full-circle to pushing out static files again.

The funny thing is, the BotLG client definitely qualifies as jammy. It’s all static, and once the initial page load has happened, it’s done. There’s literally nothing server-side, so I could easily host it through something like Netlify and benefit from all that lovely CDN caching. To be honest though, it does seem a bit like overkill. At the moment it’s hosted through my Linode account, and I’m perfectly happy with it. I do want to go and double-check my Apache rules for caching and so on, but, you know. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?