Analysis and Modeling of Evolving Database-centric Web Applications

Database-centric web applications tend to evolve over time. However, there are no comprehensive tools to analyze and present the synopsis of changes for such applications. In this paper, we address the problem of analyzing an evolving application and presenting the synopsis of changes, which can be recursively drilled down in an interactive manner. Specifically, we analyze two versions of an application, each constituting of a hierarchy of pages, page regions, and region items, and model the synopsis of changes. In addition to analyzing the content of pages, our synopsis generation algorithm takes into account, the changes resulting from page layouts, page branching transitions, and page schema dependencies. Furthermore, the region pair-wise similarity is extended to show m : n evolution as well, which is common due to clone and edit operations typically employed during development. We have developed region similarity measures to aid the analysis and a bottom-up approach is used to label the regions and the container pages. We have used this approach to implement an Evolving Application Synopsis Tool (EAST), which can analyze database-centric web applications built using Oracle Application Express Tool. An experimental study done with four deployed applications and one beta version of application demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.