An approach for reverse engineering of web-based applications

The new possibilities offered by WEB applications are pervasively and radically changing several areas. WEB applications, compared to WEB sites, offer substantially greater opportunities: a WEB application provides the WEB user with a means to modify the site status. WEB applications must cope with an extremely short development/evolution life cycle. Usually, they are implemented without producing any useful documentation for subsequent maintenance and evolution, thus compromising the desired high level of flexibility, maintainability, and adaptability that is de-facto necessary to compete and survive to market shakeout. This paper presents an approach inspired by the reverse engineering arena and a tool prototype supporting WEB application reverse engineering activities, to help maintain, comprehend and evolve WEB applications. The approach defines a set of abstract views, modeled using UML diagrams, organized into a hierarchy of different abstraction levels, depicting several aspects of a WEB application to facilitate its comprehension. A real world WEB application was used as case study, and information previously not available was recovered, with encouraging results.