Evolution of the WebDSL runtime: Reliability engineering of the WebDSL web programming language

Web applications are ideal for implementing information systems; they can organize and persist the data in a database, do not require installation on client machines, and can be instantly updated everywhere. However, web programming is complex due to its heterogeneous nature, causing web frameworks to suffer from insufficient or leaky...

Understanding Ajax applications by connecting client and server-side execution traces

Ajax-enabled Web applications are a new breed of highly interactive, highly dynamic Web applications. Although Ajax allows developers to create rich Web applications, Ajax applications can be difficult to comprehend and thus to maintain. For this reason, we have created FireDetective, a tool that uses dynamic analysis at both the client (browser...

FireDetective: Understanding Ajax Client/Server Interactions

Ajax-enabled web applications are a new breed of highly interactive, highly dynamic web applications. Although Ajax allows developers to create rich web applications, Ajax applications can be difficult to comprehend and thus to maintain. FireDetective aims to facilitate the understanding of Ajax applications. It uses dynamic analysis at both the...

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...

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...

Regression testing Ajax applications: Coping with dynamism

Note: This paper is a pre-print of: Danny Roest, Ali Mesbah and Arie van Deursen. Regression Testing AJAX Applications: Coping with Dynamism. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST’10), Paris, France. IEEE Computer Society, 2010. There is a growing trend to move desktop...

Automated Security Testing of Web Widget Interactions

This paper is a pre-print of: Cor-Paul Bezemer, Ali Mesbah, and Arie van Deursen. Automated Security Testing of Web Widget Interactions. In Proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE’09). Research Papers. ACM. 2009. We...

Agents of responsibility: Freelance web developers in web applications development

Much of the literature on responsibility in the IT field addresses the responsibilities of members of the IT profession. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the responsibilities associated with computing practitioners apply to freelance web developers. The relevant moral question is not “can freelancers be considered as professionals?”,...

Declarative Access Control for WebDSL: Combining Language Integration and Separation of Concerns

Preprint of paper published in: ICWE 2008 - 8th International Conference on Web Engineering, 14-18 July 2008; doi:10.1109/ICWE.2008.15 In this paper, we present the extension of WebDSL, a domain-specific language for web application development, with abstractions for declarative definition of access control. The extension supports the definition...