Crawl-Based Analysis of Web Applications: Prospects and Challenges

In this paper we review five years of research in the field of automated crawling and testing of web applications. We describe the open source Crawljax tool, and the various extensions that have been proposed in order to address such issues as cross-browser compatibility testing, web application regression testing, and style sheet usage analysis...

Crawling Ajax-based Web Applications through Dynamic Analysis of User Interface State Changes

Using JavaScript and dynamic DOM manipulation on the client-side of web applications is becoming a widespread approach for achieving rich interactivity and responsiveness in modern web applications. At the same time, such techniques, collectively known as Ajax, shatter the metaphor of web ‘pages’ with unique URLs, on which traditional web...

Invariant-Based Automatic Testing of Modern Web Applications

AJAX-based Web 2.0 applications rely on stateful asynchronous client/server communication, and client-side run-time manipulation of the DOM tree. This not only makes them fundamentally different from traditional web applications, but also more error-prone and harder to test. We propose a method for testing AJAX applications automatically, based...

Adinda: A knowledgeable, browser-based IDE

In practice, many people have to work together to develop and maintain a software system. However, the programmer’s key tool, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is a solo-tool, serving to help individual programmers understand and modify the system. Such an IDE does not leverage the knowledge other team members may have of the design...

Automatic invariant detection in dynamic web applications

The complexity of modern web applications increases as client-side JavaScript and dynamic DOM programming are used to offer a more interactive web experience. In this paper, we focus on improving the dependability of such applications by automatically inferring invariants from the client-side and using those invariants for testing. By combining...

Analysis and Testing of Ajax-based Single-page Web Applications

This dissertation has focused on better understanding the shifting web paradigm and the consequences of moving from the classical multi-page model to an Ajax-based single-page style. Specifically to that end, this work has examined this new class of software from three main software engineering perspectives. Software Architecture: to gain an...

A Comparison of Push and Pull Techniques for AJAX

AJAX applications are designed to have high user interactivity and low user-perceived latency. Real-time dynamic web data such as news headlines, stock tickers, and auction updates need to be propagated to the users as soon as possible. However, AJAX still suffers from the limitations of the Web’s request/response architecture which prevents...

An Architectural Style for Ajax

A new breed of web application, dubbed AJAX, is emerging in response to a limited degree of interactivity in large-grain stateless Web interactions. At the heart of this new approach lies a single page interaction model that facilitates rich interactivity. We have studied and experimented with several AJAX frameworks trying to understand their...

Migrating Multi-page Web Applications to Single-page AJAX Interfaces

Recently, a new web development technique for creating interactive web applications, dubbed AJAX, has emerged. In this new model, the single-page web interface is composed of individual components which can be updated/replaced independently. With the rise of AJAX web applications classical multi-page web applications are becoming legacy systems....