Are JAMstack conventions compatible with RESTful API design?

Question

I've been building a lot of quick prototypes on Netlify lately. I love the service for its ease of setup and deployment. But I keep running into this conflict between their JAMstacky conventions around API endpoints and my own background in RESTful API design.

To be more specific, say I am building a basic CRUD API in which I can create, fetch one, fetch all, and update some resource type . Let's say a User. If I were designing those endpoints from a RESTful perspective, it would look like this:

POST /users       -> Create a user
GET  /users       -> Fetch all users
GET  /users/{id}  -> Fetch one user
PUT  /users/{id}  -> Update a user

Now, if I were setting this up on AWS, perhaps with the serverless framework, each of those endpoints would be their own lambda. But Netlify offers no such configuration options. Which is mostly nice. I hate configuration. But it is difficult to achieve these endpoints at all with Netlify.

Specifically in this case, Netlify automatically creates endpoints which match filenames. So if you have a file named users.js, that creates a /users endpoint. The problem is, that file will be used for every possible permutation of /users. Every HTTP method. Every subroute. They all go to this one lambda. So in order to achieve a RESTful API design, I have to put everything in a single lambda and essentially make it a router. Which seems to defeat the whole idea of serverless.

So usually when you read Netlify examples, which claim to follow JAMstack patterns (something I'm not super familiar with), they do not use RESTful endpoints. Instead they tend to do something like this:

POST /create-user         -> Create a user
GET  /fetch-users         -> Fetch all users
GET  /fetch-user?id={id}  -> Fetch one user
POST /update-user         -> Update a user

So this is in some ways a Netlify question, and in some way a larger question about JAMstack patterns. Is there something inherent about JAMstack that makes it incompatible with REST? Are there different conventions which tend to replace REST for Netflify/JAMstack projects?

Answer 1

"Is there something inherent about JAMstack that makes it incompatible with REST?" I would say no as it's not related. You aren't building an API with the Jamstack. You are using a service (Netlify) which supports serverless functions that operate alongside the rest of your site. Remember that the Netlify serverless functions are just one option. You could set up your own AWS setup and support the mechanism you want, and still use it in conjunction with the rest of your Jamstack site. I like Netlify's serverless stuff, but it's not going to work for 100% of the use cases out there.

I guess my tl;dr is - Netlify tried to make serverless simple for folks building Jamstack sites, but it won't cover every use case. When it doesn't, you can still use your own solutions along with your site.