Towards a better understanding of Web applications

The paper presents a framework to recover the architecture of Web applications. Developers can visualize and navigate the recovered, architecture. Furthermore, they can analyze the architecture to gain a better understanding of their Web application. The Portable Bookshelf (PBS) environment combines much of the knowledge and techniques developed over the last decade in program understanding. It has been used to recover the design of large applications such as Linux, Apache and Mozilla. The paper describes the reuse and extension of the capabilities of PBS to support the design recovery of Web applications. We developed a set of tools capable of parsing and extracting relations between the components of Web applications. Also, we modified PBS's visualizer to handle the heterogenous nature of the Web.