Dynamic Characterization of Web Application Interfaces

Web applications are increasingly prominent in society, serving a wide variety of user needs. Engineers seeking to enhance, test, and maintain these applications and third-party programmers wishing to incorporate the data provided by these applications need to understand their interfaces. In this paper, therefore, we present methodologies for characterizing the interfaces of web applications through a form of dynamic analysis, in which directed requests are sent to the application, and responses are analyzed to draw inferences about its interface. We also provide mechanisms to increase the scalability of the approach. Finally, we evaluate the approach’s performance on six non-trivial web applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: FASE
• Authors: Marc Fisher II, Sebastian G. Elbaum, Gregg Rothermel
• Keywords: FASE 2007, Software Engineering, Third-party Programmers, User Needs, Web Applications