What is Jamstack and what is Composable DXP?

Transcript

Note: The following is the transcription of the video produced by an automated transcription system.

Akshay Sura: Thank you for joining us today, so we have some questions for Kamruz, so Kamruz, can you tell us in your mind what Jamstack is? Kamruz Jaman: Hey Akshay, good to be speaking to you about Jamstack, especially after all of the recent conferences and all the big buzz around Jamstack and all technologies related to it, right? So Jamstack, it's been getting extremely popular over the past few years. It's been around for about five years, five or six years now. And Jamstack itself, it's not a thing that you buy. It's an architectural principle and the principle was that you essentially generate your website, you pre-generate your website so that when you serve it to your customers and your visitors. It's extremely quick. There's no processing. It's just it's almost like it's going back 20 years in this paradigm, right? You're I mean, you are you and I are both old enough to remember the days before or the early days of like ASP.NET right when, when and the early days of the web. And a lot of those times we were just developing websites in pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript, usually using like HTML tables and things and very bad crude designs. But they were extremely quick because all you were doing is just serving static assets that you would log into somewhere and FTP drop into it. So, with Jamstack what you're doing, you're going back to those basics, as exist, those old principles and then your somehow whatever technology you're using, generating static resources that are then easy, then up extremely quickly and then can be scaled as well, almost infinitely because of its simplicity in this nature, it uses CDN's in the background, so you don't need to worry about. You can have built build systems built in. They don't need to set up separately. So Jamstack is an architectural principle, said it's not a thing that you buy, but the end goal is just to generate static. Files, right? Html, CSS and JavaScript.

Akshay Sura: And you hear about everyone talking about the composable digital experience platform, composable DXP all over the place, it's the hottest hashtag on the market. So, like in your view, what is composable DXP?

Kamruz Jaman: So Composable DXP builds on top of the Jamstack principles. So Jamstack is a layer where you're generating. The markup, but part of that jump is the A and the J. Right, so the A stands for APIs. They're like endpoints that you can consume data from. And then you need something to glue the end together from Jamstack, which is the markup, the HTML we just talked about. And that glue is JavaScript. So, JavaScript is essentially the messenger boy who's running between the markup and your APIs and then putting those all two together. The composable DXP is bringing together lots of different systems, so you might have an email system, you might have a separate CRM system, you might have some separate CDP customer data platform or analytics systems, separate E-commerce system. You need all of these systems to talk to each other in a simple way. And that's what the composer DXP is. You're bringing your composing all of these to work as one unit. And it's just following the same Jamstack principles, right? You're using API endpoints from each of these systems and then you're using the JavaScript to bring them all together. It sounds complex when it's when it's put together, and this is where experience helps you. It's. It's a different way of working, and it's a different way of thinking as well. So, I think from there is a learning curve involved moving from what we would class as a traditional monolithic system where everything is in one and it's all server-based and moving to this modern Jamstack and API and serverless based systems.

Akshay Sura: And the best part of all of this is you get to pick the best vendor in each of those spaces. So, email system, find the best one which works for you. The best of breed of everything.

Kamruz Jaman: Exactly. You can use whatever systems are best going to work for you. You may already be using some of these systems internally. You might not have a choice of who your CRM provider is. You may already have an internal system that you use for commerce, right? A lot of manufacturers, for example, would use SAP. So, do you want to put in another commerce system in front of SAP? Or do you leverage something that's already built into some of those platforms you already have? So, it gives you choice, it gives you variety and it saves rework, right? It says how to

Akshay Sura: Reusability as well. So that's awesome. Yeah. All right. So, thank you. And I know we have been doing Jamstack stuff for the past couple of years and glad to be ahead of the curve. So, thanks again Kamruz.

Kamruz Jaman: Yes, it's been a great learning curve as well. Great learning. It's been on the cards. It's been on the horizon that the market is moving this way. And I think one of the other important aspects of the Jamstack and the composability is. For a lot of clients, they don't want everything in that one monolithic product, right? They might not be using the analytics features fully or they might not need that personalization feature right now. They might want it in a few months or a few years as they have become. A bit more accustomed to using these systems, so why would I pay for those elements I don't want to use right now? I might as well. Reduce my complexity, reduce my costs and then just buy the pieces that I need right now and then build upon that over time, so. That's how I've been saying it with some of our customers, and that's what they're loving about, about being able to do that. They might not know. What that piece they need right now is, and those needs will change in a year's time, two years’ time when they actually need to implement those features.

Akshay Sura: And that's a great insight. See you again later Kamruz,

Kamruz Jaman: Bye, speak to you soon.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me. @akshaysura13 on Twitter or on Slack.