Automatic workarounds for web applications

  • Authors:

  • Antonio Carzaniga;Alessandra Gorla;Nicolò Perino;Mauro Pezzè

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland;University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland;University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland;University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present a technique that finds and executes workarounds for faulty Web applications automatically and at runtime. Automatic workarounds exploit the inherent redundancy of Web applications, whereby a functionality of the application can be obtained through different sequences of invocations of Web APIs. In general, runtime workarounds are applied in response to a failure, and require that the application remain in a consistent state before and after the execution of a workaround. Therefore, they are ideally suited for interactive Web applications, since those allow the user to act as a failure detector with minimal effort, and also either use read-only state or manage their state through a transactional data store. In this paper we focus on faults found in the access libraries of widely used Web applications such as Google Maps. We start by classifying a number of reported faults of the Google Maps and YouTube APIs that have known workarounds. From those we derive a number of general and API-specific program-rewriting rules, which we then apply to other faults for which no workaround is known. Our experiments show that workarounds can be readily deployed within Web applications, through a simple client-side plug-in, and that program-rewriting rules derived from elementary properties of a common library can be effective in finding valid and previously unknown workarounds.