Comprehending Ajax Web Applications by the DynaRIA Tool

Thanks to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with their enhanced interactivity, responsiveness and dynamicity, the user experience in the Web 2.0 is becoming more and more appealing and user-friendly. The dynamic nature of RIAs and the heterogeneous technologies, frameworks, communication models used for implementing them negatively affect their analyzability and understandability. Consequently, specific software techniques and tools are needed for supporting RIA comprehension. This paper presents DynaRIA, a tool for the comprehension of RIAs implemented in Ajax that is based on dynamic analysis. It provides functionalities for recording and analyzing user sessions from several perspectives, and for producing various types of abstractions and visualizations about the run-time behavior of the application. In order to evaluate this tool, four case studies involving different comprehension tasks of Ajax applications have been executed. The experimental results showed the usefulness and effectiveness of the tool that provided a valid support for Ajax comprehension in reverse engineering, debugging, testing and quality assessment contexts.