Extracting Interaction-Based Stateful Behavior in Rich Internet Applications

Although asynchronous technologies such as Ajax make Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) responsive, they can result in unexpected behavior due to nondeterministic client-side processing and asynchronous communication. One difficulty in understanding such erroneous behavior lies in the unpredictable contexts of the running system. Dynamic behavior analysis techniques do not help to verify the correctness of certain "blind spots" in the execution path. In this work, we present a static approach for extracting all possible state transitions described in source code from the RIAs. Our approach is based on the assumption that user, server and self interactions with the RIAs can change the states of the application. Our method consists of three steps: (i) annotating interactions and extracting their controls in source code (ii) abstracting a call graph to extract relationships among the interactions and (iii) refining the relationships with interaction controls By extracting the state machines of test scenarios of the correct and wrong behavior, it can help developers to pinpoint the statements in the source code that lead to the erroneous behavior. Our approach has been evaluated against a few experimental cases and we conclude that it can extract comprehensible state machines in a reasonable time.