Script InSight: Using Models to Explore JavaScript Code from the Browser View

As Web programming standards and browser infrastructures have matured, the implementation of UIs for many Web sites has seen a parallel increase in complexity. In order to deal with this problem, we are researching ways to bridge the gap between the browser view of a UI and its JavaScript implementation. To achieve this we propose a novel JavaScript reverse-engineering approach and a prototype tool called Script InSight. This approach helps to relate the semantically meaningful elements in the browser to the lower-level JavaScript syntax, by leveraging context available during the script execution. The approach uses run-time tracing to build a dynamic, context-sensitive, control-flow model that provides feedback to developers as a summary of tracing information. To demonstrate the applicability of the approach we present a study of an existing open-source Web 2.0 application called the Java Pet Store and metrics taken from several popular online sites.