Automatic reverse engineering of interactive dynamic web applications to support adaptation across platforms

Abstract

The effort and time required to develop user interface models has been one of the main limitations to the adoption of model-based approaches, which enable intelligent processing of user interface descriptions. In this paper, we present a tool to perform reverse engineering of interactive dynamic Web applications into a model-based framework able to describe them at various abstraction levels. We indicate how information in HTML, HTML 5, CSS, Ajax and JavaScript is transformed into such logical framework, which facilitates adaptation to other types of interactive devices. We also discuss how this reverse engineering tool has been exploited in an environment for run-time adaptation or migration of interactive Web applications to various devices in ubiquitous use cases. Author KeywordsUser interface reverse engineering, Web applications, Model-based user interface descriptions.

CrowdAdapt

“…On the other hand, interface transformation refers to approaches where existing representations of a user interface are mapped to models from which a new interface can be generated. Interface transformation therefore usually consists of three steps: reverse engineering [1], model transformation [11] and interface generation. This is described in detail for the CAMELEON reference framework [5] which formed the basis of many model-based user interface approaches such as MARIA [16].…”

“…We present one experiment in detail in which CrowdAdapt was used in a realworld setting for the CNN web site (Fig. 1), one of the world's most popular news web sites according to the Alexa ranking 1 .…”

“…We do not want to make a case for this particular layout, but instead use it as an example of a crowd-generated layout that illustrates the potential of crowdsourced adaptation. 1 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com In the following, we present the key components of Crowd-Adapt. For each component, we will discuss both the implemented functionality and the key design challenges that had to be addressed.…”

Beyond Responsive Design: Context-Dependent Multimodal Augmentation of Web Applications

“…Then, it creates the corresponding elements, with the associated attributes and events, in the logical concrete descriptions. In contrast to previous reverse engineering tools [2], this module is also able to handle recently introduced HTML 5 and CSS 3 elements.…”

Model driven reverse engineering of user interface — A comparative study of static and dynamic model generation tools

“…Amlfitano et al [9] presented a reverse engineering approach based on dynamic analysis for abstracting finite state machines representing the client-side behavior offered by RIAs. Bellucci et al [11] presented a tool to perform reverse engineering of interactive dynamic Web applications into a model-based framework.…”