Web Applications: Spaghetti Code for the 21st Century
The software industry is currently in the middle of a paradigm shift. Applications are increasingly written for the Web rather than for any specific type of an operating system, computer or device. Unfortunately, the technologies used for Web application development today violate well-known software engineering principles. Furthermore, they have reintroduced problems that had already been eliminated years ago in the aftermath of the “spaghetti code wars” of the 1970′s.
In this paper, Tommi Mikkonen and Antero Taivalsaari, investigate Web application development from the viewpoint of established software engineering principles. They argue that current Web technologies are inadequate in supporting many of these principles. However, they also argue that there is no fundamental reason for Web applications to be any worse than conventional applications in any of these areas. Rather, the current inadequacies are just an accidental consequence of the poor conceptual and technological foundation of the Web development technologies today.
Web Applications – Spaghetti Code for the 21st Century (PDF)
It seems to me that part of the issue is that programming is a relatively easy thing to pick up on your own. I had no formal schooling for programming, which means I was not exposed to the ‘rules’, and thus had to create my own based from the flow of programming, trial and error, security holes, and ultimately, my own best design patterns. Because everyone has their own style of programming, you’ll never get the same product twice without collaboration. This is why open-source is such an important thing…
benmerrill
June 17, 2008 at 3:41 pm
[...] Web Applications: Spaghetti Code for the 21st Century « PHP::Impact ( [str blog] ) Established software engineering principles, such as modularity, consistency, simplicity, reusability and portability have been overlooked but the problem is not inherent (tags: development methodology internet research 2008 management) [...]
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June 24, 2008 at 7:34 am