Headless / SaaS Technologies

  • Page Owner: Not Set
  • Last Reviewed: 2025-07-22

Preferred technologies

Frontend Frameworks

  • SvelteKit - Probably has the best syntax and developer experience of all current frontend frameworks. Well supported on Vercel.
  • Nuxt - Vue has been a good choice for embedded interactive apps. For a full site, some of our Vue experience carries over. Also well supported on Vercel.

Content Delivery

  • GraphQL - GraphQL is our first choice as the most flexible and specific content delivery mechnanism if availabe.
    • Codegen - When using GraphQL, we use Codegen to generate GraphQL client and models
  • Content Delivery APIs - Most CMSes ship with an out-of-the-box content delivery API that can be used.
  • Enterspeed - Enterspeed can be used as delivery mechanism, especially in cases where the data source has no delivery API but can export to Enterspeed, or in cases where we're aggregating content from multiple sources into a single set.

Languages

  • TypeScript - We generally prefer TypeScript for its type safety and good IDE / type-ahead support.

Hosting

  • Vercel - Hosting with Vercel includes two integrated features that we take advantage of:
    • Image optimization service - Allows us to scale images at the edge by Vercel (SaaS does not include any image optimization capabilities). Example SvelteKit implementation.
    • On-Demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) - Pages are rendered and cached. We use a hook (below) to clear the cache per page.

Builds

For SvelteKit / Vercel combination, we're using a YML pipeline to build the project on Vercel. Note that this pipeline basically sends the contents of the site sourcecode to Vercel and completes the build on Vercel. We do not have Vercel pull directly because (at the time of this writing), Vercel did not support pulling source code from Azure DevOps.