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New Technology in the New Year

With a top secret project in the works, and necessity being the mother of invention, we will be embarking on a brave new experiment in 2019.

Like many Canadian universities, Web Services at Carleton has traditionally worked in the world of WordPress. WordPress offers a valuable solution to the traditional problem of a multi-page, single-content-source website; however, one of the most interesting aspects of a university environment, for a website perspective, is the requirement to aggregate content from a variety of disparate data sources.

In other words, we need to be able to pull and push information from one website to another.

While WordPress will remain a valuable tool in our kit, there is a more suitable tool for the problem before us — JAM!

I’m not talking about the delicious strawberry preserve I put on my Saturday morning toast; JAM is the acronym given to the modern web stack: Javascript, (restful) APIs, and (pre-rendered) markup. Of particular interest to the team are the performance improvements, modern tooling, and inherent interoperability of the technologies.

By using Javascript to draw data from distributed restful APIs, we will make a website’s content appear uniform to the visitor. Restful APIs return a data format called JSON, which our javascript code processes into pre-rendered markup defined by our developers.

The technology solution we have chosen allows for any combination of content to be pulled before it is served to the visitor, or after to provide real time updates. This enables us to deliver an extraordinarily fast, responsive, accessible, and SEO-friendly website whose content can be accessed across all platforms.

Here in Web Services we work hard to keep our tool chain modern, and our developers’ skills current. Decoupling our front end from our back end allows us to easily specialize in particular areas of our development process, while at the same time offering the opportunity to build skills in less specialized areas. By moving to an API-driven development process we will be empowered to allow individual developers to work in the manner they feel most efficient, while requiring minimal time getting up to speed.

The new technology stack presents an exciting learning opportunity, and will enable us to continue to hone our service excellence in delivering fast, consistent, and stable websites to fulfill our clients’ needs.

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