Construction of the system dependence graph for Web application slicing

Abstract

The computation of program slices on Web applications may be useful during debugging, when the amount of code to be inspected can be reduced, and during understanding, since the search for a given functionality can be better focused. The system dependence graph is an appropriate data structure for slice computation, in that it explicitly represents all dependences that have to be taken into account in slice determination. In this paper the main problems related to the construction of the system dependence graph are considered. With no loss of generality, solutions are presented with reference to the server side programming language PHP and to the client side language Javascript. Most of the difficulties concern event and hyperlink handling, dynamic generation of HTML code, and direct access to HTML elements by client code. An example of Web application is analyzed, supporting the feasibility of the approach.