An Efficient Mechanism of Generating Call Graph for JavaScript using Dynamic Analysis in Web Application

摘要

Web applications are replacing traditional native applications in recent years. For web applications, JavaScript is the most extensively used client side programming languages. The large JavaScript codebase often makes applications hard to understand, maintain and extend. Call graph is a human understandable program representation that can be used as a basis for maintenance and further extension of the application. In maintenance phase call graph can play a vital role by facilitating developers to easily trace the code that implements a particular feature. There is insufficient tool support for generating call graph for JavaScript. For its dynamic nature, JavaScript call graph generation becomes challenging. We present a dynamic analysis based mechanism to construct the call graph of JavaScript of a client side web application. Our evaluation on web applications demonstrates that the technique is precise and the rate of unidentified nodes in call graph is acceptable.