In the vision of Ubiquitous Computing everyday objects become smart. Technically, this requires some sort of processing and communication technology. We have designed and implemented a middleware for spontaneous networking in Ubiquitous Computing environments. The major objectives were minimalism and extensibility in order to deploy the middleware on a variety of devices ranging from sensor nodes to classical general purpose computers. In this paper we will assess the taken approach based on two follow-up projects: the port of BASE to a small embedded system and the design and implementation of a component system on top of BASE. While the fundamental concepts and design principles of BASE have proven to be solid, both projects provided insights that led to minor conceptual and major technical changes.