Automating navigation sequences in AJAX websites

Abstract

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration, automated testing of web applications or technology and business watch. One crucial part in web automation applications is to allow easily generating and reproducing navigation sequences. Previous proposals in the literature assumed a navigation model today turned obsolete by the new breed of AJAX-based websites. Although some open-source and commercial tools have also addressed the problem, they show significant limitations either in usability or their ability to deal with complex websites. In this paper, we propose a set of new techniques to deal with this problem. Our main contributions are a new method for recording navigation sequences supporting a wider range of events, and a novel method to detect when the effects caused by a user action have finished. We have evaluated our approach with more than 100 web applications, obtaining very good results. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.