Construction of the System Dependence Graph for Web Application Slicing
Abstract
The computation of program slices on Web applications
may be useful during debugging, when the amount of code
to be inspected can be reduced, and during understanding,
since the search for a given functionality can be better
focused. The system dependence graph is an appropriate data
structure for slice computation, in that it explicitly
represents all dependences that have to be taken into account
in slice determination.
In this paper, the main problems related to the construction
of the system dependence graph are considered. With no loss
of generality, solutions are presented with reference to the
server side programming language PHP and to the client side
language Javascript. Most of the difficulties concern event
and hyperlink handling, dynamic generation of HTML code, and
direct access to HTML elements by client code. An example of
Web application is analyzed, supporting the feasibility of
the approach.
Postscript version of the paper.