The DynaRIA tool for the comprehension of Ajax web applications by dynamic analysis

Thanks to the fast and growing diffusion of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), the user experience in the Web 2.0 is becoming more and more appealing and user friendly. RIAs are indeed a new generation of Web applications that exploit a combination of technologies and new development patterns for providing a more interactive, responsive and dynamic user experience. Unfortunately, some characteristics of RIAs, such as the heterogeneity of the implementation technologies, as well as the possibility of dynamically generating the code of the application, cause a general worsening of their analyzability and understandability. Consequently, specific analysis techniques and tools are needed for supporting their comprehension effectively. This paper presents an approach for the comprehension of RIAs implemented in Ajax that is based on a tool for dynamic analysis called DynaRIA. The tool provides an integrated environment for tracing application executions and analyzing them from several perspectives. Moreover, the tool is able to abstract several views on the structure and run-time behavior of the application that can be used in various comprehension activities. To show the actual support provided by DynaRIA in different comprehension contexts, four case studies involving two real Ajax applications will be illustrated in the paper. The experimental results showed the usefulness and effectiveness of the tool in comprehension, debugging, testing and quality assessment scenarios.