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Extracting Client-side Web Application Code

Full text:  
Authors: Josip Maras, Jan Carlson, Ivica Crnkovic
Source: World Wide Web Conference 2012, ACM, Lyon, France
 

Abstract

The web application domain is one of the fastest growing and most wide-spread application domains today. By utilizing fast, modern web browsers and advanced scripting techniques, web developers are developing highly interactive applications that can, in terms of user-experience and responsiveness, compete with standard desktop applications. A web application is composed of two equally important parts: the server-side and the client-side. The client-side acts as a user-interface to the application, and can be viewed as a collection of behaviors. Similar behaviors are often used in a large number of applications, and facilitating their reuse offers considerable benefits. However, due to client-side specifics, such as multi-language implementation and extreme dynamicity, identifying and extracting code responsible for a certain behavior is difficult. In this paper we present a semi-automatic method for extracting client-side web application code implementing a certain behavior. We show how by analyzing the execution of a usage scenario, code responsible for a certain behavior can be identified, how dependencies between different parts of the application can be tracked, and how in the end only the code responsible for a certain behavior can be extracted. Our evaluation shows that the method is capable of extracting stand-alone behaviors, while achieving considerable savings in terms of code size and application performance.
 

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{Maras_2763:2012,
   author = {Josip Maras and Jan Carlson and Ivica Crnkovic},
   title = {Extracting Client-side Web Application Code},
   booktitle = {World Wide Web Conference 2012},
   month = {April},
   year = {2012},
   publisher = {ACM},
   url = {http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/index.php?choice=publications&id=2763},
}

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