Towards Web Application Mobilization via Efficient Web Control Extraction

Abstract

Traditional web applications are not suitable for mobile devices, because mobile devices are usually equipped with small screens and use slow and expensive mobile network. In order to adapt web applications to mobile devices, existing approaches reconstruct particular web applications, or adapt only partial views of web pages. They require a lot of additional reconstructing work or network bandwidth. In this paper we propose an approach that can extract a part of a web page as an executable web control efficiently. Our approach monitors the execution of user code, builds a dependency graph of executed user code, and performs slicing based on the dependency graph. The evaluation on two real-world web applications shows that our approach is able to extract executable web controls efficiently, and for the two web applications, visiting extracted web controls instead of the original web pages can save 98% and 23% of bandwidth respectively.