Finding function clones in Web applications

Abstract

Many Web applications use a mixture of HTML and scripting language code as the front-end to business services. Analogously to traditional applications, redundant code is introduced by copy-and-paste practices. Code duplication is a pathological form of software reuse because of its effects on the maintenance of large software systems. This paper describes how a simple semi-automated approach can be used to identity cloned functions within scripting code of Web applications. The results obtained from applying our approach to three Web applications show that the approach is useful for a fast selection of script function clones, and can be applied to prevent clone spreading or to remove redundant scripting code.