Filippo Ricca and Paolo Tonella.
Program Transformations for Web Application Restructuring.
Abstract
This chapter aims at providing a presentation of the principles and
techniques involved in (semi)-automatic transformation of Web applications,
in several different restructuring contexts. The necessary background
knowledge is provided to the reader in the sections about the syntax of the
multiple languages involved in Web application development and about the
role of restructuring in a highly dynamic and rapidly evolving development
environment. Then, specific examples of Web restructuring are described in
detail. In the presentation of the transformations required for
restructuring, as well as in the description of the grammar for the
involved languages, TXL (Cordy et al., 2002) and its programming language
is adopted as a unifying element.
The chapter is organized into the following sections: in the section
following the Introduction, the problems associated with the analysis of
the multiple languages used with Web applications are discussed. Then, the
process of Web application restructuring is considered. Three examples of
Web restructuring are described in more detail in the next three sections
(design restructuring, migration of a static Web site to a dynamic Web
application, consistency among monolingual portions of a multilingual Web
site). Related works and concluding remarks are at the end of the chapter.