Reverse Engineering of Web Based Applications: a Survey on Methods and Techniques

Web based applications are for their nature continuously evolving. The availability of up-to-date documentation is needed to make effective and easier their maintenance and evolution. Unfortunately, such documentation is often not produced or not up- dated mainly because of development processes and maintenance inter- ventions constrained by a very short time-to-market. Thus, several methods, techniques, and tools to reverse engineer web based applications have been developed in the last decade to recover the needed information in order to support the required maintenance and evolution tasks. This survey provides a report about the main methods, techniques, and tools for RE of web based applications known in the literature, classi- fying them according to some characterizing features, such as their aim (e.g., model recovering, identification of cloned pages), the type of analy- sis (e.g., static, dynamic), and so on. The survey would be a useful mean to better identify the methods and techniques that best fits the needs of a RE task.