Understanding Jamstack and its Perception in Web Development

Abstract: In recent years, web development and technologies became pivotal for our lives and ubiquitous across business sectors. Web development is an inherently complex process, which involves different stakeholders, tasks, and technologies. Through the years, researchers and practitioners in web development created so-called web stacks as a way to alleviate the complexity associated to web development. Web stacks can be defined as sets of technologies coupled together for the purpose of designing and developing all the web infrastructure. As technologies and tools evolve, new stacks are designed and realized. In this thesis, we investigate one such new stack: Jamstack. We investigate how Jamstackis perceived by practitioners in the web development domain focusing on its perceived benefits and limitations, its main application domains, and the supporting tools. We achieve this using an online survey involving 31 respondents. We analyze the collected data using both vertical and orthogonal analysis. The collected data indicate that Jamstack is perceived as a promising stack whose benefits overcome possible limitations. The data suggest that Jamstack will certainly play a role in modern and future web development although there is no strong evidence that it will take over and replace traditional stacks.