Reengineering Web applications based on cloned pattern analysis

Web applications are subject to continuous and rapid evolution. Often it happens that programmers indiscriminately duplicate Web pages without considering systematic development and maintenance methods. This practice creates code clones that make Web applications hard to maintain and reuse. This paper presents an approach for reengineering Web applications based on clone analysis that aims at identifying and generalizing static and dynamic pages and navigational patterns of a Web application. Clone analysis is also helpful for identifying literals that can be generated from a database. A case study is described which shows how the proposed approach can be used for restructuring the navigational structure of a Web application by removing redundant code.