Kartik Bajaj
Karthik Pattabiraman
Ali Mesbah
ABSTRACT
Modern web applications consist of a significant amount of client- side code, written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. In this paper, we present a study of common challenges and misconceptions among web developers, by mining related questions asked on Stack Over- flow. We use unsupervised learning to categorize the mined questions and define a ranking algorithm to rank all the Stack Overflow questions based on their importance. We analyze the top 50 questions qualitatively. The results indicate that (1) the overall share of web development related discussions is increasing among developers, (2) browser related discussions are prevalent; however, this share is decreasing with time, (3) form validation and other DOM related discussions have been discussed consistently over time, (4) web related discussions are becoming more prevalent in mobile development, and (5) developers face implementation issues with new HTML5 features such as Canvas. We examine the implications of the results on the development, research, and standardization communities.
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Index Terms
- Mining questions asked by web developers
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Andrew Brooks
Client-side code of web applications is written in JavaScript, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and cascading style sheets (CSS). But what difficulties are experienced by those developing such code__?__ To answer this question, over half a million Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/) questions and answers from July 2008 to March 2013 were analyzed using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Cross-browser compatibility difficulties were found to have had declined in importance over the time period examined. Application programming interface (API) resources for JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS are inferred to be far from ideal. Possible reasons for the decline in importance of cross-browser compatibility difficulties are said to include: JavaScript libraries have become better at handling cross-browser issues, and browsers have evolved to better follow World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications. Among individual topics causing the most difficulties were HTML5 Canvas and the document object model (DOM). Most readers will find the heuristics and ranking formula employed for data filtering to be reasonable. For example, one heuristic was to consider only accepted answers. However, most readers will be disappointed with section 4.5. With the aim of understanding the main technical challenges faced by web developers, the top 50 questions for each of the three datasets (JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS tagged questions) were qualitatively analyzed. Yet only four questions and their resolutions are described in section 4.5. Further useful insights could have been conveyed had more of the top questions and their resolutions been described. This paper is recommended to those involved in web application development. Online Computing Reviews Service
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