An Approach for Debugging Client Dynamic Web Applications

摘要

Beside the emergence of the Internet and the Web, an equal (or probably more important) trend has been the propagation of scripting technology. Client scripting involves the use of light, yet powerful languages in making the Web more interactive and dynamic. In view of software description, however, the light-weight feature turned out to be a major drawback to develop and maintain the scripts with a good quality. Once an unexpected behavior emerges, sometimes it is difficult to find the cause even for a short script. This, paper, in addition to discussing the challenges facing the debugging process, presents an approach proposed for debugging client Web applications focusing on debugging scripts as they are the dynamic enabling components and the means by which execution of the business rules can be captured. In addition to identifying the challenges, our aim is at facilitating the developing and the debugging process. For this purpose, we focus on imposing syntactic constrains over a script and on visualizing its state while under debugging. For the purpose of proving the effectiveness of the proposed new approach, an experimental debugging tool is prototyped. As the result, it is shown that our approach is helpful in finding implicit bugs and in inspecting the state of the application under debugging.