The World Wide Web is the most powerful medium for information sharing and distribution in the history of humankind. The use of the Web is rapidly spreading into many new areas outside its original intended use, including its use as a platform for software applications. So far, a number of obstacles have hindered the development and deployment of full-fledged, truly interactive web applications. However, new emerging standards such as HTML5 and WebGL are removing the remaining limitations and transforming the Web into a real software platform. In this paper we argue that the trend towards web-based software will cause a paradigm shift in the software industry from binary applications to dynamically delivered web applications. In the future, the use of conventional binary programs will be limited to system software, whereas the vast majority of end user software will be developed using web technologies. All this will imply significant changes in the development, deployment and use of software, and open up interesting opportunities in software engineering research as well.

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Embedded systems have been an important part of daily human life for a long time. However, in academic education the subject is somewhat new and to some extent undefined. Most courses focus on hardware aspects of embedded systems, and at the same time there is a lack of embedded programming courses. In this paper, we describe our experiences of organizing, designing and evaluating an embedded programming course. We describe course assignments in detail and present pass-rate of each assignment. We also present our improvements for course of upcoming years.

Embedded programs are controlling a number of devices we use daily. The software of an embedded device is usually tightly coupled with the device hardware, and therefore developing embedded programs is fundamentally different from programming general-purpose computers. In academic education both hardware and software aspects of embedded systems need to be covered. In this paper we provide some general guidelines that can serve as a starting point when designing embedded programming courses. These guidelines are based on our experiences and evaluation of two implementations of an embedded programming course that consists of hands-on assignments and lectures. Furthermore, we discuss about how to improve the course in the future.