Web app restructuring based on shadow DOMs to improve maintainability

Abstract

As web apps quickly evolve, for their maintenance it is essential to separately encapsulate independent widgets composing the web pages. Thus, this paper proposes a new approach to restructuring a web app to achieve such encapsulation, which allows independent development and maintenance of widgets. The approach applies the shadow document object model (DOM) and template standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Components standards. Empirical evaluation shows that our approach can be applicable to restructuring open source web apps and improving their maintainability. We also show that the approach can improve performance of web apps in terms of response time and the amount of transferred data over a network.