Open Collections

On the detection, localization and repair of client-side JavaScript faults

University of British Columbia

With web application usage becoming ubiquitous, there is greater demand for making such applications more reliable. This is especially true as more users rely on web applications to conduct day-to-day tasks, and more companies rely on these applications to drive their business. Since the advent of Web 2.0, developers often implement much of the web application’s functionality at the client-side, using client-side JavaScript. Unfortunately, despite repeated complaints from developers about confusing aspects of the JavaScript language, little work has been done analyzing the language’s reliability characteristics. With this problem in mind, we conducted an empirical study of real-world JavaScript bugs, with the goal of understanding their root cause and impact. We found that most of these bugs are DOM-related, which means they occur as a result of the JavaScript code’s interaction with the Document Object Model (DOM). Having gained a thorough understanding of JavaScript bugs, we designed techniques for automatically detecting, localizing and repairing these bugs. Our localization and repair techniques are implemented as the AutoFLox and Vejovis tools, respectively, and they target bugs that are DOM-related. In addition, our detection techniques – Aurebesh and Holocron – attempt to find inconsistencies that occur in web applications written using JavaScript Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks. Based on our experimental evaluations, we found that these tools are highly accurate, and are capable of finding and fixing bugs in real-world web applications.

Text

2016-10-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/59388

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/