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Return of the Great Spaghetti Monster: Learnings from a Twelve-Year Adventure in Web Software Development

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Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 322))

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Abstract

The widespread adoption of the World Wide Web has fundamentally changed the landscape of software development. Only ten years ago, very few developers would write software for the Web, let alone consider using JavaScript or other web technologies for writing any serious software applications. In this paper, we reflect upon a twelve-year adventure in web development that began with the development of the Lively Kernel system at Sun Microsystems Labs in 2006. Back then, we also published some papers that identified important challenges in web-based software development based on established software engineering principles. We will revisit our earlier findings and compare the state of the art in web development today to our earlier learnings, followed by some reflections and suggestions for the road forward.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In 2016, Wired Magazine reported that the size of the average web page had exceeded the size of the original (year 1993) Doom multiplayer 3D computer game (https://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-webpage-now-size-original-doom/).

  2. 2.

    Even this paper was written using the online tool Overleaf instead of a conventional, PC-based word processing application such as Microsoft Word.

  3. 3.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming.

  4. 4.

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nokia Technologies, Tampere, Finland

    Antero Taivalsaari

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Tommi Mikkonen

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  1. Antero Taivalsaari
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  2. Tommi Mikkonen
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Correspondence to Tommi Mikkonen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Agder, Kristiansand, Vest-Agder Fylke, Norway

    Tim A. Majchrzak

  2. Center for Information Technology, FBK-ICT irst, Trento, Italy

    Paolo Traverso

  3. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Karl-Heinz Krempels

  4. University of Paris 1, Paris, France

    Valérie Monfort

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Taivalsaari, A., Mikkonen, T. (2018). Return of the Great Spaghetti Monster: Learnings from a Twelve-Year Adventure in Web Software Development. In: Majchrzak, T., Traverso, P., Krempels, KH., Monfort, V. (eds) Web Information Systems and Technologies. WEBIST 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93527-0_2

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