Client-side web application slicing

Highly interactive web applications that offer user experience and responsiveness of standard desktop applications are becoming prevalent in the web application domain. However, with these benefits come certain drawbacks. For example, the event-based architectural style, and poor support for code organization, often lead to a situation where code responsible for a certain behavior is intermixed with irrelevant code. This makes development, debugging and reuse difficult. One way of locating code implementing a certain behavior is program slicing, a method that, given a subset of a program´s behavior, reduces the program to a minimal form that still produces that behavior. In this paper we present a semi-automatic client-side web application slicing method, describe the web page dependency graph, and show how it can be used to extract only the code implementing a certain behavior.