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 World Wide Web. Unfortunately, the technologies used for Web application development today violate well-known software engineering principles, and they have reintroduced problems that had already been eliminated years ago in the aftermath of the ldquospaghetti code warsrdquo of the 1970s. In this paper, we investigate Web application development from the viewpoint of software engineering principles. We argue that current Web technologies are inadequate in supporting many of these principles, but also 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 an accidental consequence of the poor conceptual and technological foundation of the Web development technologies today.