The mashware challenge
Tommi Mikkonen, Antero Taivalsaari · 2010
The software industry is currently experiencing a paradigm shift towards web-based software. Although the Web was not originally designed to be a software platform, it is rapidly becoming the platform for all the end-user software. In this position paper we argue that (1) development practices for web applications are still far from the maturity levels of traditional software engineering, (2) web development will evolve towards -- mashup software that leverages source code and software components downloaded dynamically from all over the world, (3) there is still an impedance mismatch between web development and software engineering, (4) the trend towards mashware will exacerbate the gap between web development and software engineering, and (5) research is needed in several areas, including modularity and security, to ensure that the academic world does not get left behind from the fundamental changes that are impacting in the software industry.