A Resource Monitoring Scheme for Web Applications

Abstract

A web application is an application that uses World Wide Web’s infrastructure to deliver its service and a web browser as a client. It is accessed by users over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. Web applications are popular due to the ubiquity of web browsers and the convenience of using a web browser as a client. They have become much more complex due to the inclusion of various other scripting technologies like JavaScript, Ajax and Cascading Style Sheets etc. HTML not only describes structural semantics of a web page through markup tags, but also enables the inclusion of external resources into web documents, such as images, scripts, style sheets, media files and other objects as parts of the web page. These are called Web resources. An efficient resource monitoring method is necessary for the development of web application, because the monitoring data helps in failure detection, load balancing, scheduling strategies and performance optimization. This is in response to the growing complexity and different development practices adopted in web application development, which makes it difficult to maintain resources efficiently. In this work, a resource monitoring scheme has been proposed and implemented to monitor the web resources such as images, scripts and style sheets. The results are produced in an interactive graph based visualization. The graph shows the size, load time and frequency of access of these resources, and dependency among the links accessing a particular resource. This representation helps in decision-making process from the organization point of view. For small to medium scale web applications, the scheme can also help in some speedup.