Slicing of Web Applications Using Source Code Analysis

Abstract

Program slicing revealed a useful way to limit the search of software defects during debugging and to better understand the decomposition of the application into computations. The web application is very widely used for spreading business throughout the world. To meet the desire of the customers, web applications should have more quality and robustness. Slicing, in the ?eld of web application, helps disclosing relevant information and understanding the internal system structure. This in turn helps in debugging, testing and in improving the program comprehensibility. The system dependence graph is an appropriate data structure for slice computation, in that it explicitly represents all dependencies that have to be taken into account in slice determination. We have extended the system dependence graph to Web-Application Dependence Graph (WADG). We have developed a partial tool for automatic generation of the WADG and computation of slices. In our literature survey, we found that most of the automatic graph generation tools are byte-code based. But, our tool uses the dependency analysis from the source code of the given program. We have presented three case studies by taking open source web programs and applying our techniques and slicing algorithm. We have found that the slices computed is correct and precise, which will be help full for program debugging and testing. Construction of the system dependence graph for Web applications is complicated by the presence of dynamic code. In fact, a Web application builds the HTML code to be transmitted to the browser at run time. Knowledge of such code is essential for slicing.