Visualization and Dependency Analysis for Linkage Structures in Web Applications

Abstract

With the prevalence of Web applications, its linkage structures become more and more complex and the whole architecture of a Web site has always been experiencing evolvement. Therefore, analyzing and visualizing the linkage structure of a Web application is quite beneficial to the building of a new Web application or the updating of an old one. The paper proposes a visualization and dependency analysis framework for a Web application, and implements a prototype tool WASViewer. Based on the deep analysis for the text feature of hyperlink, a regular expression-based linkage information extraction method is presented. Then, a third-part component WinGraphviz, is adopted to visualize the dependency relation, which is expressed via adjacent matrix. The complexity metrics for linkage structure graph are also addressed. We found that the degree distribution of dependency graph roughly obeys the power law. In addition, a medium-size Web application is used to validate the effectiveness of our methods.