The solid ecosystem: ready for mainstream web development?

• Autor(a) principal: Pinto, Pedro Miguel da Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/17052
• topic: Data; Security; Privacy; Decentralisation; Solid; Dados; Segurança; Privacidade; Descentralização

Companies have been collecting data from its users over the years. This data it is often grouped in places called data silos and may then be used for profit in many ways: building data models to predict or enforce user behaviour, selling their data to other companies, among others. Moreover, the centralisation of data makes it appealing for people with malicious intentions to attack data silos. Security breaches violate users’ privacy, by exposing its sensitive data such as passwords, credit card information, and personal details. One solution to this problem is to separate data from these systems, demanding a shift in the way companies create web applications. This dissertation explores different solutions and compares them, focusing on a particular project named Solid. Created by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Solid is a solution that takes advantage of the power of RDF in order to create a web of Linked Data, introducing decentralisation on software architecture in different layers. In order to achieve mainstream adoption, various aspects such as the impact of the introduction of this technology have on the user experience and development experience need to be considered. This dissertation documents the development of a prototype web application built with Solid at its core and compares it with the same application developed using a more traditional stack of technologies. An analysis was conducted under two perspectives: developer and final user. While in the former it is considered aspects such as development time and documentation diversity and quality, the latter is focused on the user experience. Resorting to a questionnaire presented to real users, it was concluded that the user experience of some the features of these applications, such as the user’s registration and the login process is affected by introducing this type of decentralisation. Moreover, it was also considered the lack of documentation this technology has at the moment, though it has improved throughout the development of this dissertation.