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

A Component- and Push-based
Architectural Style for Ajax
Applications ⋆
A new breed of web application, dubbed Ajax, is emerging in response to a limited
degree of interactivity in large-grain stateless Web interactions. At the heart
of this new approach lies a single page interaction model that facilitates rich interactivity.
Also push-based solutions from the distributed systems are being
adopted on the web for Ajax applications. The field is, however, characterized by
the lack of a coherent and precisely described set of architectural concepts. As a
consequence, it is rather difficult to understand, assess, and compare the existing
approaches. We have studied and experimented with several Ajax frameworks
trying to understand their architectural properties. In this chapter, we summarize
four of these frameworks and examine their properties and introduce the
Spiar architectural style which captures the essence of Ajax applications. We
describe the guiding software engineering principles and the constraints chosen to
induce the desired properties. The style emphasizes user interface component development,
intermediary delta-communication between client/server components,
and push-based event notification of state changes through the components, to
improve a number of properties such as user interactivity, user-perceived latency,
data coherence, and ease of development. In addition, we use the concepts and
principles to discuss various open issues in Ajax frameworks and application
development.
Chapter
2
2.1 Introduction
ver the course of the past decade, the move from desktop applications
O towards web applications has gained much attention and acceptance.
Within this movement, however, a great deal of user interactiveness has been
lost. Classical web applications are based on a multi page interface model, in
which interactions are based on a page-sequence paradigm. While simple and
elegant in design for exchanging documents, this model has many limitations
for developing modern web applications with user friendly human-computer
interaction.
Recently, there has been a shift in the direction of web development towards
the new generation of Web 2.0 applications. A new breed of web application,
dubbed Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) (Garrett, 2005), has
⋆ This chapter was published in the Journal of Systems and Software in December 2008 (Mesbah
and van Deursen, 2008a).