Reverse engineering Web applications: the WARE approach

wcre, 2001

The new possibilities offered by WEB applications are pervasively and radically changing several areas. WEB applications, compared to WEB sites, offer substantially greater opportunities: a WEB application provides the WEB user with a means to modify the site status. WEB applications represent a competitive advantage: they are critical and strategically relevant resources, not only to communicate the company image, but also to manage production and distribution.

21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'05), 2005

In this chapter a methodology for Reverse Engineering Web Applications based on the Goals/Models/Tools paradigm is presented. This methodology is called WARE (Web Application Reverse Engineering). The Reverse Engineering process needed to obtain a set of views of a Web Application is outlined in this chapter. The views are cast into UML diagrams. A survey of the main approaches in literature to the reverse engineering of Web Applications is presented. The methodologies adopted to realize the tasks of the process and the tool supporting them are described in the next chapters.

2001

The new possibilities offered by WEB applications are pervasively and radically changing several areas. WEB applications, compared to WEB sites, offer substantially greater opportunities: a WEB application provides the WEB user with a means to modify the site status. WEB applications represent a competitive advantage: they are critical and strategically relevant resources, not only to communicate the company image, but also to manage production and distribution.

Proceedings of the 2004 ACM …, 2004

Web applications have become complex and crucial for many firms, especially when combined with areas such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and BPR (Business Process Reengineering). Since then the scientific community has focused attention to Web application design, development, analysis, testing, by studying and proposing methodologies and tools. This paper describes an automatic tool for the construction of UML models from existing Web applications. This tool, named WebUml, generates class and state diagrams by analysing source code and by interacting with the Web server. This reverse engineering tool is based on source code static analysis and also applies mutational techniques in order to exploit the server side execution engine to accomplish part of the dynamic analysis. This tool will be the core of a testing suite under construction at our laboratory. WebUml generated models (diagrams) will be used as a base for test case generation and coverage analysis.

2007

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become one of the most important means of communication for commercial enterprises of all kinds. This is particularly the case in commercial sectors where on-line sales often represent a significant proportion of the total sales. The current sophistication of World Wide Web services is such that some businesses have elected to conduct all their sales on-line. Regardless of the individual degree of commitment to on-line commerce most commercial enterprises acknowledge that it is important to have at least a WWW presence. In the rush to obtain such an on-line presence, and subsequently maintain and expand this presence, well established software engineering practices applied to the production of more traditional software system have often been overlooked. This can partly be attributed to difficulties in adapting traditional software engineering practices to WWW software, and partly to the "rush to market" commercial pressures. The result has been that many WWW applications are poorly documented (or not documented at all) and poorly structured, which in turn has made it very difficult to maintain these system. Much work has been done to establish sound software engineering techniques for the construction of WWW systems. However, with respect to the many systems built without the benefit of such software engineering practices, programmers charged with maintenance of these systems have been forced to first reverse engineer these systems. Reverse engineering is a time consuming and mundane task that entails none of the "glamour" associated with the construction of software systems. In the case of WWW applications the "state-of-the-art" is still in its infancy. This paper presents a technical review of the current "state of the art" of WWW Application (WA) revere engineering.

International Journal of Web Information Systems, 2009

With the Web's emergence and generalization in various domains such as economy, commerce, education, culture, etc, the Web application reverse-engineering process becomes necessary in order to facilitate the maintenance of such applications and the evolution towards new Web technology like XML, semantic Web, etc. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the Web application reverse-engineering. The approach is based on ontology and it generates a conceptual schema modelling the Web application. This conceptual schema is rich in semantic but reduced in relation to the global ontology. The proposed approach mainly relies on HTML pages analysis, i.e. to analyse tables, lists, forms, etc. It consists of three successive phases: First, the extraction of useful information from the HTML pages. Second phase is the analysis of the extracted information using the domain ontology. And finally, we generate the corresponding UML conceptual schema.

Proceedings. Fourth International Workshop on Web Site Evolution, 2000

The rapid diffusion of Internet has triggered a growing request for new Web sites and Web Applications (WA). Due to the pressing market demand, new WAs are usually developed in a very short time, while existing WAs are modified frequently and quickly. In these conditions, the well-known software engineering principles are not usually applied, as well as well-defined software processes and methodologies are rarely adopted. As a consequence, WAs usually present disordered architectures, poor or non-existing documentation, and can be analyzed, comprehended and modified with a considerable effort. Reverse engineering methods and tools are being proposed in order to reduce the effort required to comprehend existing WAs and to support their maintenance and evolution. In this paper, the experimentation of a reverse engineering approach is described. Experimentation was carried out with the aim of assessing which characteristics of a WA mostly affect comprehensibility. The results of the experiments highlighted a set of techniques and best practices that should be applied for producing best analyzable and maintainable WAs. These best practices are illustrated in the paper.

Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing - SAC '06, 2006

In this work we present techniques and tools that enable effective reverse engineering procedures for web applications that were developed using the promising ASP.NET technology. We deal with model-driven development in its reverse aspect by implementing reverse engineering methods. Our implemented methods model web applications using a well-known, web oriented and robust language, namely WebML. This is, to the authors' best knowledge, a novel re-engineering transformation. In this paper we propose a method to reverse engineer web applications in order to extract their conceptual model using WebML notation. Moreover, we present an efficient tool we have developed in order to implement the proposed method, along with a study of the application of our tool to an exemplar, contentmanagement web application. The overall results are quite encouraging and indicate that our approach is efficient.

2008 10th International Symposium on Web Site Evolution, 2008

The Ubiquitous Web Applications (UWA) Hyperbase model is a user-centered conceptual model representing the contents of a Web application, their organization in terms of entities and components, and the semantic associations between entities from which navigation paths are derived. Such a model may provide useful support for the software engineer during maintenance and evolution tasks. This paper presents a strategy for the semi-automatic abstraction of UWA Hyperbase models from existing Web applications. The results from a case study, involving four applications from real world, carried out to assess the effectiveness of the strategy are also presented and discussed.

Journal of Computer Science (INFOCOMP), 2007

With the Web's emergence and generalization in various domains such as economy, commerce, education, culture, etc, the Web application reverse-engineering process becomes necessary in order to facilitate the maintenance of such applications and the evolution towards new Web technology like XML, semantic Web, etc. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the Web application reverse-engineering. The approach is based on ontology and it generates a conceptual schema modelling the Web application. This conceptual schema is rich in semantic but reduced in relation to the global ontology. The proposed approach mainly relies on HTML pages analysis, i.e. to analyse tables, lists, forms, etc. It consists of three successive phases: First, the extraction of useful information from the HTML pages. Second phase is the analysis of the extracted information using the domain ontology. And finally, we generate the corresponding UML conceptual schema.