Script InSight: Using Models to Explore JavaScript Code from the Browser View

  • Authors:
  • Peng Li;Eric Wohlstadter

  • Affiliations:
  • University of British Columbia,;University of British Columbia,

  • Venue:
  • ICWE '9 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

As Web programming standards and browser infrastructures have matured, the implementation of UIs for many Web sites has seen a parallel increase in complexity. In order to deal with this problem, we are researching ways to bridge the gap between the browser view of a UI and its JavaScript implementation. To achieve this we propose a novel JavaScript reverse-engineering approach and a prototype tool called Script InSight. This approach helps to relate the semantically meaningful elements in the browser to the lower-level JavaScript syntax, by leveraging context available during the script execution. The approach uses run-time tracing to build a dynamic, context-sensitive, control-flow model that provides feedback to developers as a summary of tracing information. To demonstrate the applicability of the approach we present a study of an existing open-source Web 2.0 application called the Java Pet Store and metrics taken from several popular online sites.