Reverse engineering of GWT applications

Abstract

Web applications have gained significant popularity. Relevant technologies, however, are to a great extent still immature and in constant evolution. This means many current applications are subject to constant change to keep up with the technology, leading to a degradation of application quality, both from an implementation and a usage perspective. In this context, tools that enable reasoning about the quality of the application from its source code can have a significant role. This paper reports on our preliminary work on reverse engineering the user interface layer of web applications directly from source code. Its applicability to GWT is described through two examples.