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ReAjax: a reverse engineering tool for Ajax Web applications

ReAjax: a reverse engineering tool for Ajax Web applications

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In contrast to conventional multi-page Web applications, an Ajax application is often developed as a single-page application in which content and structure are changed at runtime according to user interactions, asynchronous messages received from the server and the current state of the application. These features make Ajax applications quite hard to understand for programmers. The authors propose to support Ajax comprehension through reverse engineering. In this study, the authors propose a reverse-engineering tool, ReAjax, to build GUI-based state models from Ajax applications. ReAjax applies dynamic analysis and uses execution traces to generate a finite state machine of the target application GUI. They show that GUI-based state models obtained semi-automatically are similar to those obtained manually and they can be used for program understanding purposes. Finally, the authors summarise a case study and some usage scenarios in which ReAjax has been applied to five real Ajax applications with the purpose of evaluating its viability and effectiveness in recovering models.

Inspec keywords: reverse engineering; finite state machines; software tools; graphical user interfaces; Internet; data compression

Other keywords: ReAjax; asynchronous messages; Ajax comprehension; GUI-based state model; reverse engineering tool; single-page application; finite state machine; program understanding; Ajax Web application; user interactions

Subjects: Programming support; Internet software; Data handling techniques; Graphical user interfaces; Automata theory; Systems analysis and programming

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http://iet.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0152
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