Reverse engineering to achieve maintainable WWW sites

Abstract

The growth of the World Wide Web and the accelerated development of web sites and associated web technologies has resulted in a variety of maintenance problems. The maintenance problems associated with web sites and the WWW are examined. It is argued that currently web sites and the WWW lack both data abstractions and structures that could facilitate maintenance. A system to analyse existing web sites and extract duplicated content and style is described here. In designing the system, existing Reverse Engineering techniques have been applied, and a case for further application of these techniques is made in order to prepare sites for their inevitable evolution in future.

Detecting Clones in Business Applications

“…Web applications are prone to the threat of code clones due to the uninstructed development and maintenance processes as well as the inherent complexity [4,25]. Levenshtein is a common technique used in [25,26,30] to detect cloned web pages.…”

Resolution of static clones in dynamic Web pages

“…Web sites and web applications contain a higher proportion of cloned code than other softwareon average duplicated code amounts to 5-15% of the total amount of code in an application [9,10], whereas cloning ratios of 30% and higher are not uncommon for web sites [3]. The main reason for high cloning ratios in web documents is HTML's lack of code reuse tools.…”

“…The main reason for high cloning ratios in web documents is HTML's lack of code reuse tools. Boldyreff and Kewish point out [3] that HTML lacks even an "include" directive, which is available in many programming languages. Therefore developers are forced to reuse code by cloning simply because no other alternative is available-if a piece of content must appear on several pages, the only way to do it is to place a copy in every page.…”

“…The work that is most closely related to ours is by Boldyreff and Kewish [3], who introduce a system for reducing duplication in web sites. They propose to store components of web site pages in a relational database, with each component being stored only once, and instrumenting original pages with scripts to retrieve appropriate content from the database.…”

Integrating Static and Dynamic Analysis to improve the Comprehension of Existing Web Applications

“…Boldyreff and Kewish proposed a methodology for the reverse engineering of WAs, with the purpose of identifying duplications and improving maintainability [2]. Vanderdonckt et al proposed a tool, named Vaquista [18], for reverse engineering of WA presentation model.…”