Guest Editorial: Software Architecture for the Web of Things (SAWoT)

The Web is evolving into a platform where physical and virtual worlds meet. Within the next ten years it will be supposition that literally everything is connected and online. Cheap connectivity technologies foster this shift. Being constantly online is already true for most people due to the emerging online socializing and collaboration services. Now, the cheap connectivity technologies foster this evolution for other services. The emerging Web-based services are extending human abilities for socializing and collaboration. From a software development perspective, the world of computing is shifting from the era of single device computing to a new era where literally everything is interconnected, online, and programmable. Due to this shift, the single device computing era is coming to an end, and a new era where literally everything is interconnected and online is beginning. This Special Issue includes research papers focused on two themes: engineering the Internet of Things (IoT) from the perspective of the Web, and user experience from the perspective of multi-device software engineering. Web of Things is the general term used for describing all the approaches of connecting physical objects to the World Wide Web. In the new era of computing the development is evolving from traditional client-server architectures to decentralized multi-device architectures in which people use various types of Web-enabled client devices, and data are stored simultaneously in numerous devices and cloud-based services. This new era will dramatically raise the expectations for device interoperability, implying significant changes for software architecture as well. Liquid software refers to the approaches in which applications and data can seamlessly flow from one device to another, allowing the users to roam freely across all the computing devices that they have. The goal is that users of liquid software do not need to worry about data copying, manual synchronization of device settings, application installation, or other burdensome device management tasks. Rather, things should work with minimal effort. From the software development perspective, liquid software should dynamically adapt to the set of devices that are available to run it, as opposed to responsive software, which adapts to different devices, under the assumption that only one device at a time is used to run the application.