Server enforced program safety for web application engineering

  • Authors:

  • Henry Detmold;Katrina Falkner;David S. Munro;Travis Olds;Ron Morrison;Stuart Norcross

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia;School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia;School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia;School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia;School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland;School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

As Web application development evolves from initial ad hoc approaches to large scale Web engineering, it is increasingly important to adopt systematic approaches to ensuring safety properties of Web applications. In particular, engineers constructing Web applications should be provided with at least the same guarantees of static safety as in preceding development paradigms; the current absence of such guarantees leads to Web application users being forced to endure failure modes that would never be accepted from conventional applications. We observe that much is known about program safety in the traditional software development domain. Based on this observation, we contend that Web engineering should adopt an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to program safety. That is, existing solutions from conventional development should be evolved to match the exigencies of the Web engineering context, rather than engendering solutions that are wholly new. With this evolutionary approach in mind, we introduce a categorisation of the problem area into four major safety properties, each related by analogy to a problem in the conventional development paradigm. Further, we observe that in the Web context, these properties are interrelated, and hence adopt an integrated model for their enforcement. Based on this integrated model, we demonstrate an approach to Web application safety that is both simpler and more powerful than previous, non-integrated, approaches. In contrast to previous systems, our approach as implemented in our WebStore application server achieves the safety goals without recourse to new and unfamiliar programming constructs. Finally, WebStone benchmark results comparing our server to existing mainstream Web application development platforms demonstrate that it provides acceptable performance for a wide range of Web applications.