Building rich internet applications models: Example of a better strategy

Abstract

Crawling "classical" web applications is a problem that has been addressed more than a decode ago. Efficient crawling of web applications that use advanced technologies such as AJAX (called Rich Internet Applications, RIAs) is still an open problem. Crawling is important not only for indexing content, but also for building models of the applications, which is necessary for automated testing, automated security and accessibility assessments and in general for using software engineering tools. This paper presents a new strategy to crawl RIAs. It uses the concept of Model-Based Crawling (MBC) first introduced in [1], and introduces a new model, the "menu model", which we show to be much simpler than previous models for MBC and more effective at building models than previously published methods. This method and others are compared against a set of experimental and real RIAs. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.