The Web as a software platform: Ten years later

In the past ten years, the Web has become a dominant deployment environment for new software systems and applications. In view of its current popularity, it is easy to forget that only 10-15 years ago hardly any developer would write serious software applications for the Web. Today, the use of the web browser as a software platform is commonplace, and JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world. In this paper we revisit some predictions that were made over ten years ago when the Lively Kernel project was started back in 2006. Ten years later, most of the elements of the original vision have been fulfilled, although not entirely in the fashion we originally envisioned. We look back at the Lively Kernel vision, reflecting our original goals to the state of the art in web programming today.