Crawling AJAX by Inferring User Interface State Changes

Crawling AJAX by Inferring User Interface State Changes

Mesbah, A.
Bozdag, E.
Van Deursen, A.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Computer Technology

2008-12-31

Preprint of paper published in: ICWE 2008 - 8th International Conference on Web Engineering, 14-18 July 2008; doi:10.1109/ICWE.2008.24 AJAX is a very promising approach for improving rich interactivity and responsiveness of web applications. At the same time, AJAX techniques shatter the metaphor of a web "page" upon which general search crawlers are based. This paper describes a novel technique for crawling AJAX applications through dynamic analysis and reconstruction of user interface state changes. Our method dynamically infers a state-flow graph modeling the various navigation paths and states within an AJAX application. This reconstructed model can be used to generate linked static pages. These pages could be used to expose AJAX sites to general search engines. Moreover, we believe that the crawling techniques that are part of our solution have other applications, such as within general search engines, accessibility improvements, or in automatically exercising all user interface elements and conducting state-based testing of AJAX applications. We present our open source tool called CRAWLJAX which implements the concepts discussed in this paper. Additionally, we report a case study in which we apply our approach to a number of representative AJAX applications and elaborate on the obtained results.

ajax
crawler
search engine

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4900fa13-4b03-422e-91ea-dda1958c3855

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2008-022

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2008 The Author(s)
IEEE