Columbus: A Tool for Discovering User Interface Models in Component-based Web Applications

摘要

The processes of replacing, maintaining or adapting the existing User Interfaces in Component-based Web Applications to new conditions requires a significative amount of efforts and resources for coordinating their different stakeholders. Additionally, there are many design alternatives, which can vary according to the context of use. Therefore, understanding the structure and composition of UIs and their contained elements can provide valuable insights for future adaptations. In this paper, we present a tool for discovering UI models in the source code of Component-based Web Applications, which could be used to support the reverse engineering process. Subsequently, we evaluated its capabilities of User Interface model extractions using open-source project TodoMVC. The evaluation process shows the main limitations of the JavaScript frameworks for creating an abstract UI model (i.e. technology independent model) for Web Applications.