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

Conclusion
ith the advent of Ajax technologies, a new paradigm for developing interactive
web applications has emerged. This dissertation has focused
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on better understanding this shifting web paradigm, and the consequences
of moving from the classical multi-page model to an Ajax-based single-page
style. Specifically to that end, this work has examined this new class of software
from three main software engineering perspectives:
Software Architecture to gain an abstract understanding of the key architectural
properties of Ajax applications;
Software Reengineering to understand the implications of a migration from
classical multi-page web systems to single-page Ajax variants;
Software Analysis and Testing to explore strategies for analyzing and testing
this new breed of web application.
7.1 Contributions
The main contributions of the thesis can be summarized as follows:
• A new component- and push-based architectural style, called Spiar, for
single-page Ajax web applications. The style results from a study of different
major Ajax frameworks, investigating their salient architectural
properties, key elements, and constraints on those elements required to
achieve the desired properties. We provide a detailed comparison of
what the classical web architecture, called Rest, provides, and what the
modern Ajax systems require. Our style captures the essence of Ajax
frameworks and can be seen as an abstract model of different architectural
implementations. As such, Spiar allows to evaluate the tradeoffs
between different architectural properties of Ajax systems.
• A process for migrating multi-page web systems to single-page Ajaxbased
interfaces through reverse and model-driven engineering. The
reverse engineering steps of the process have been implemented in a
tool called Retjax. Retjax is capable of inferring a navigational model
of the web interface by conducting a meta-model clustering technique
for web page classification, which we call schema-based clustering. We
have shown that schema-based clustering is more accurate and reliable
in grouping web pages with structural similarity than approaches which
are based on the HTML syntax trees. Additionally, Retjax is capable of
producing a list of candidate UI components for migration, through a
simplification process of clusters along the navigational paths.
Chapter
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