Understanding Event-based Interactions in Enterprise Web Applications

JavaScript is widely used today to create interactive web applications that replace many traditional desktop applications. However, understanding the behaviour of web applications is a challenging endeavour for developers. Despite its importance and challenges, there is currently not much research dedicated to supporting program comprehension for web applications and popular industrial tools, such as Firebug and Chrome DevTools, are limited in their capabilities to support web developers effectively. In this work, we propose to extend our web application comprehension technique, called Clematis, so that it can readily be applied on industrial enterprise web applications. Clematis automatically captures low-level events, their temporal and causal relations, and creates a behavioural model that is presented to the developer as an interactive visualization. To make this technique applicable in practice, we will explore how custom higher-order actions can be intercepted and mapped to lower level native event interactions and presented to web developers.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Ali Mesbah

Student:

Saba Jani

Partner:

SAP Business Objects Division

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of British Columbia