Analysis and Testing of Ajax-based Single-page Web Applications

Introduction
A ccording to recent statistics,1 there are approximately 1.46 billion people
using the Internet, with a penetration of 21.9%, based on the world population
estimate of 6.67 billion persons for mid-year 2008. This figure represents
an incredible increase of 305% in 2008, compared to the year 2000.
The World Wide Web (WWW) has been growing at a very fast pace (see
Figure 1.1). In July 2008, Google engineers announced 2 that the search engine
had discovered one trillion unique URLs on the Internet.
Current wide user participation in accessing, creating, and distributing digital
content is mainly driven by two factors: wider world wide broadband
access and new web technologies providing user-friendly software tools.
The web has had a significant impact on business, industry, finance, education,
government, and entertainment sectors, as well as our personal lives.
Many existing software systems have been and continue to be migrated to the
web, and many new domains are being developed, thanks to the ubiquitous
nature of the web.
In this thesis, we focus on understanding, analyzing, and testing interactive
standards-based web applications, and the consequences of moving from the
classical multi-page model to a single-page style.
In this chapter, we first take a brief look at the evolution of the web from
its infancy stages up until today, with respect to the level of offered user
interactivity and responsiveness. We discuss the advantages and challenges
that new web technologies bring with them and outline the main questions
that are addressed in this research.
1.1 Web Evolution
1.1.1 Static Hypertext Documents
The WWW was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, and released in 1992. The
web was initially based on the following four concepts (Berners-Lee, 1996):
• Independence of specifications, to achieve the ultimate goal of flexibility
through as few and independent specifications as possible;
• The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), a sequence of characters used
to identify or name a resource, such as a web page, uniquely on the
web space. The web requires only unidirectional links, enabling users to
link to external resources without any action required from the external
1 http://www.internetworldstats.com, retrieved 20 October 2008.
2 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
Chapter
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