An Investigation of Cloning in Web Applications

Rajapakse, Damith C.; Jarzabek, Stan

doi:10.1007/11531371_35

Cited by 22 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…For example, STEE applied XVCL to support a Web Portal Product Line under unexpected business pressure, without much prior planning. The results were so good that NUS initiated a number of research studies in the Web domain that revealed unique opportunities for our techniques in this new domain [10] [12]. In a short time, we advanced our understanding of the interplay and synergy between advanced Web technologies and our technique, and learned what it took to turn these findings into further improvements of our approach.…”

Section: Benefits and Lessons Learnedmentioning

confidence: 87%

Project-driven university-industry collaboration

Jarzabek

Pettersson

2006

Proceedings of the 2006 International Workshop on Summit on Software Engineering Education

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Joint research between National University of Singapore (NUS) and ST Electronics Pte Ltd (STEE) started through a broad collaboration agreement, seven years ago. Collaboration was intensified by a research project that also involved two other partners, namely University of Waterloo and Netron Inc. This new project led to development of a reuse technology called XVCL. The continuity of collaboration was sustained through a projectdriven approach, that evolved around development and application of XVCL. Collaboration helped STEE to advance reuse practice via application of XVCL in several software product line projects. Early feedback from industrial applications along with many other inputs from STEE helped NUS team validate and refine XVCL reuse methods, explore new research directions, and ensured that academic research results remained in sync with industrial realities. In the paper, we describe our modes of collaboration, results, and factors that were critical to sustain collaboration and benefits gained over years on both sides.

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Section: Benefits and Lessons Learnedmentioning

confidence: 87%

Project-driven university-industry collaboration

Jarzabek

Pettersson

2006

Proceedings of the 2006 International Workshop on Summit on Software Engineering Education

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“…We designed the three PCEs based on the CPG-Nuke (www.cpgnuke.com) open source web portal. CPG-Nuke is an adaptation of PHP-Nuke (http://phpnuke.org), a popular open source web application, averaging 1 2 million downloads per year during the 2004-2006 period. By using CPG-Nuke as the basis of our implementations, we hoped not only to reduce implementation workload, but also to ensure that our implementations follow an industry-accepted architecture.…”

Section: Phase I: Using Server Pages To Unify Clonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Web applications are implemented using a mixture of content types (ASP, C#, CSS, DTD, HTML, Java, JavaScript, etc.). In our previous study [1], we found 59 content types in 17 web applications (we considered all text files that are likely to be maintained by hand); on average, one web application involved 10 different content types. Furthermore, some clones can involve multiple content types intertwined with each other.…”

Section: Ability To Use Multiple Content Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards generic representation of web applications: solutions and trade‐offs

Rajapakse

Jarzabek

2008

Softw Pract Exp

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Server pages (also called dynamic pages) render a generic web page into many similar ones. The technique is commonly used for implementing web application user interfaces (UIs). Yet our previous study found a high rate of repetitions (also called 'clones') in web applications, particularly in UIs. The finding raised the question as to why such repetitions had not been averted with the use of server pages. For an answer, we conducted an experiment using PHP server pages to explore how far server pages can be pushed to achieve generic web applications. Our initial findings suggested that generic representation obtained using server pages sometimes compromises certain important system qualities such as run-time performance. It may also complicate the use of WYSIWYG editors. We have analysed the nature of these trade-offs, and now propose a mixed-strategy approach to obtain optimum generic representation of web applications without unnecessary compromise to critical system qualities and user experience. The mixed-strategy approach applies the generative technique of XVCL to achieve genericity at the meta-level representation of a web application, leaving repetitions to the actual web application. Our experiments show that the mixed-strategy approach can achieve a good level of genericity without conflicting with other system qualities. Our findings should open the way for others to better-informed decisions regarding generic design solutions, which should in turn lead to simpler, more maintainable and more reusable web applications. INTRODUCTIONServer pages (also called dynamic pages) are commonly used to implement web application user interfaces (UIs). ASP, JSP and PHP are typical examples of web technologies that use some form of server pages. A server page is a combination of HTML and programming language scripts, which the web server uses to generate web pages dynamically at run time. Therefore, a server page can represent many similar web pages in a generic form.Our previous study [1] revealed a high level of repetitions in the domain of web applications. We analysed 17 web applications of different sizes, developed using different technologies and in different application domains. We found a higher incidence of clones in web applications as compared with traditional applications, particularly in the UI area. It is tempting and often useful to represent such clones in a unique, generic form for a number of reasons. Such unification reduces the size and the cognitive complexity of a software solution. It explicates dependencies among program parts that contain clones, and reduces the chance of update anomalies. The C++ standard template library (STL) is a powerful example of simplifications and engineering benefits achievable from a skillfully designed generic representation. While techniques used to achieve genericity of STL may not be equally effective in other domains, generative techniques can provide more versatile solutions to the generic design problem [2][3][4][5].This paper presents an experiment we have...

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“…A large number of approaches and tools have been proposed to identify clones or similar Web pages [8,12,[14][15][16]23,24]. For example, Calefato et al [23] exploit a metric-based approach and a pattern matching algorithm to compare scripting code fragments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar page styles are manually identified by the software engineer analyzing the information stored in the system database. Rajapakse and Jarzabek [24] analyze the results achieved by applying different cloning approaches on Web applications of different sizes and developed for different application domains, by teams of different structures and in different development environments. The study revealed that cloning equally affects small, medium, or large Web applications, and the number of clones increases over time.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying similar pages in Web applications using a competitive clustering algorithm

Lucia

Scanniello

Tortora

2007

J. Softw. Maint. Evol.: Res. Pract.

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We present an approach based on Winner Takes All (WTA), a competitive clustering algorithm, to support the comprehension of static and dynamic Web applications during Web application reengineering. This approach adopts a process that first computes the distance between Web pages and then identifies and groups similar pages using the considered clustering algorithm. We present an instance of application of the clustering process to identify similar pages at the structural level. The page structure is encoded into a string of HTML tags and then the distance between Web pages at the structural level is computed using the Levenshtein string edit distance algorithm. A prototype to automate the clustering process has been implemented that can be extended to other instances of the process, such as the identification of groups of similar pages at content level. The approach and the tool have been evaluated in two case studies. The results have shown that the WTA clustering algorithm suggests heuristics to easily identify the best partition of Web pages into clusters among the possible partitions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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An Investigation of Cloning in Web Applications

Cited by 22 publications

References 11 publications

Project-driven university-industry collaboration

Project-driven university-industry collaboration

Towards generic representation of web applications: solutions and trade‐offs

Identifying similar pages in Web applications using a competitive clustering algorithm

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