Frontend Glossary of Terms & Documentation

Jamstack

"Pre-rendered content is served to a CDN and made dynamic through APIs and serverless functions. Technologies in the stack include JavaScript frameworks, Static Site Generators, Headless CMSs, and CDNs."

• https://jamstack.org/
• https://www.netlify.com/jamstack/

Static Site Generator (SSG)

"Think of a static site generator as a script which takes in data, content and templates, processes them, and outputs a folder full of all the resultant pages and assets."

NextJS is a static site generator.

• https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/pages#static-generation-recommended
• https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/04/14/what-is-a-static-site-generator-and-3-ways-to-find-the-best-one/
• https://jamstack.org/generators/

Server Side Rendering (SSR)

Where static sites are built at deploy time, server-rendered sites are built at runtime.

Netflify, with the NextJS plugin, allows us to use both SSG and SSR.

• https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/pages#server-side-rendering
• https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/12/02/next.js-should-i-use-ssr-or-ssg/
• https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/06/10/2-ways-to-create-server-rendered-routes-using-next.js-and-netlify/

Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)

• https://www.netlify.com/blog/2021/03/08/incremental-static-regeneration-its-benefits-and-its-flaws/