Determinacy in static analysis for jQuery

AndreasenEsben,; Møller, Anders

doi:10.1145/2714064.2660214

Cited by 34 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…The authors argued the results might be helpful to improve static pointer analysis. Similarly, Andreasen and Møller presented a static approach to infer and exploit determinacy information [26]. Our study shows that although object property changes happen frequently in JavaScript websites, there are many properties whose Copyright [25,26]) can be used on real JavaScript applications to establish its effectiveness in practice.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 72%

Empirical study of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects

Wei

Xhakaj

Ryder

2015

Softw. Pract. Exper.

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SUMMARYDespite the popularity of JavaScript for client-side web applications, there is a lack of effective software tools supporting JavaScript development and testing. The dynamic characteristics of JavaScript pose software engineering challenges such as program understanding and security. One important feature of JavaScript is that its objects support flexible mechanisms such as property changes at runtime and prototype-based inheritance, making it difficult to reason about object behavior. We have performed an empirical study on real JavaScript applications to understand the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects. We present metrics to measure behavior of JavaScript objects during execution (e.g., operations associated with an object, object size, and property type changes). We also investigated the behavioral patterns of observed objects to understand the coding or user interaction practices in JavaScript software.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 72%

Empirical study of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects

Wei

Xhakaj

Ryder

2015

Softw. Pract. Exper.

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“…At the moment our translation from HTML5 applications to our tree-rewriting model is prototypical and does not incorporate many features that such a rich and complex language as JavaScript has, especially in the presence of libraries. Therefore, an important research direction is to develop a more robust translation, perhaps by building on top of existing JavaScript static analysers like WALA [50,54] and TAJS [9,28,27]. As Andreasen and Møller [9] describe, a static analysis of JavaScript in the presence of jQuery is presently a formidable task for existing static analysers for JavaScript.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The current state of the art is well surveyed by Andreasen and Møller [9], with the main tools in the field being WALA [50,54] and TAJS [9,28,27]. These tools (and others) provide traditional static analysis frameworks encompassing features such as points-to [26,54] and determinacy analysis [9,50], type inference [33,28] and security properties [23,24]. The modelling of the HTML DOM is generally treated as part of the heap abstraction [27,24] and thus the tree structure is not precisely tracked.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Detecting redundant CSS rules in HTML5 applications: a tree rewriting approach

2015

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HTML5 applications normally have a large set of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) rules for data display. Each CSS rule consists of a node selector and a declaration block (which assigns values to selected nodes' display attributes). As web applications evolve, maintaining CSS files can easily become problematic. Some CSS rules will be replaced by new ones, but these obsolete (hence redundant) CSS rules often remain in the applications. Not only does this "bloat" the applications -increasing the bandwidth requirement -but it also significantly increases web browsers' processing time. Most works on detecting redundant CSS rules in HTML5 applications do not consider the dynamic behaviors of HTML5 (specified in JavaScript); in fact, the only proposed method that takes these into account is dynamic analysis, which cannot soundly prove redundancy of CSS rules. In this paper, we introduce an abstraction of HTML5 applications based on monotonic tree-rewriting and study its "redundancy problem". We establish the precise complexity of the problem and various subproblems of practical importance (ranging from P to EXP). In particular, our algorithm relies on an efficient reduction to an analysis of symbolic pushdown systems (for which highly optimised solvers are available), which yields a fast method for checking redundancy in practice. We implemented our algorithm and demonstrated its efficacy in detecting redundant CSS rules in HTML5 applications.

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“…Therefore, a CSS minification should not affect the rendering of any such tree by the browser. Although a document-dependent optimisation (that take these infinitely many trees into account) seems appropriate, this is far from realistic given the long-standing difficulty of performing sound static analysis for JavaScript especially in the presence of DOM-trees [58,65,2,36,35,30]. This would make an interesting long-term research direction with many more advances on static analysis for JavaScript.…”

Section: Evaluations Of Optimisationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

CSS Minification via Constraint Solving

Hague

Lin

Hong

2019

ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.

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Minification is a widely-accepted technique which aims at reducing the size of the code transmitted over the web. This paper concerns the problem of semantic-preserving minification of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) -the de facto language for styling web documents -based on merging similar rules.The cascading nature of CSS makes the semantics of CSS files sensitive to the ordering of rules in the file. To automatically identify rule-merging opportunities that best minimise file size, we reduce the rule-merging problem to a problem concerning "CSS-graphs", i.e., node-weighted bipartite graphs with a dependency ordering on the edges, where weights capture the number of characters.Constraint solving plays a key role in our approach. Transforming a CSS file into a CSS-graph problem requires us to extract the dependency ordering on the edges (an NP-hard problem), which requires us to solve the selector intersection problem. To this end, we provide the first full formalisation of CSS3 selectors (the most stable version of CSS) and reduce their selector intersection problem to satisfiability of quantifier-free integer linear arithmetic, for which highly-optimised SMT-solvers are available. To solve the above NP-hard graph optimisation problem, we show how Max-SAT solvers can be effectively employed. We have implemented our rule-merging algorithm, and tested it against approximately 70 real-world examples (including examples from each of the top 20 most popular websites). We also used our benchmarks to compare our tool against six well-known minifiers (which implement other optimisations). Our experiments suggest that our tool produced larger savings. A substantially better minification rate was shown when our tool is used together with these minifiers.

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Determinacy in static analysis for jQuery

Cited by 34 publications

References 40 publications

Empirical study of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects

Empirical study of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects

Detecting redundant CSS rules in HTML5 applications: a tree rewriting approach

CSS Minification via Constraint Solving

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