A React.js-Based Approach for Enhancing Content Management and User Experience in Dynamic Web Applications

This paper presents an original Model-Driven-Engineering (MDE) approach to support the verification and testing of security properties in dynamic web applications. Based on a previously recovered UML-based fine-grained security model, the approach begins by transforming the model into a Prolog-based formal model. The Prolog model is then checked to verify whether the application conforms to specified access control security properties. We demonstrate the use of our method on the popular open source bulletin board system PhpBB 2.0, in the context of three test scenarios: testing for unauthorized access, web application security maintenance, and web application re-engineering.

Dynamic web pages composed of inter-woven (tangled) source code written in multiple programming languages (e.g., HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS) makes it difficult to analyze and manage clones in web applications. Despite more than a decade of research on software clones, there are not many studies towards the investigation of code clones in web applications. In this paper, we present an in-depth study on the patterns (i.e., forking and templating) of exact and near-miss code clones in two industrial dynamic web applications having distinct architecture. The findings of our study confirm the believed patterns for cloning and suggest that specialized techniques and tool support are necessary for effectively managing clones in the tangled source code of dynamic web applications.

In a dynamic web application, client-side code is often dynamically generated from server-side code. Client-side program entities such as HTML presentation elements and Javascript functions/variables are embedded within server-side string literals or variables' values. However, existing tools for code maintenance such as automatic renaming support only work for program entities in a single language on either the server side or the client side. In this paper, we introduce BabelRef, a novel tool that is able to automatically identify and rename client-side program entities and their references that are embedded within server-side code.

Dynamic Web applications, such as e-commerce Web application, extensively use databases as backend servers. These Web applications are highly dependent on the efficiency with which the Web databases can be accessed. A dynamic Web page consists of many small fragments of scripting languages, called Web views, which may require access to data in disparate databases. These Web views when materialized can enhance the efficiency of database access. An e-commerce Web application has large number of users involved in various personalized interactive activities. These generate a stream of Web page accesses and modification requests that necessitate taking dynamic decisions for selecting Web views for materialization, which minimize the average access time of Web views. In this paper, a Web view selection algorithm (WVSA) that selects Web views for materialization is proposed. Experimental results suggest that materializing Web views using WVSA increases the efficiency of Web view accesses.

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1 Research Premises and HypothesisMaintenance costs have a consistent weight in the total costs generated by an application during its entire lifecycle. Previously conducted research and studies that focus on software maintenance support this claim. In [2], the 60/60 rule of software is depicted. The rule claims that maintenance accounts for 60% of the total costs generated by a software in its entire lifecycle. Enhancement or perfective [3] maintenance tasks account for 60% of all the costs generated by maintenance [2], whereas error correction or corrective [3] maintenance tasks account only for 17% of total maintenance costs [2]. In [4] it's stated that software applications evolve over time to meet the changing needs which leads to maintenance generating 67% of the applications total lifecycle costs. In [5] it is argued that maintenance typically accounts for 75% or more of the total software workload. Other relevant research place maintenance costs at 90% [6], 75% [7], 90% [8] or at 60% to 70% [9] of the overall application's lifecycle cost. It is therefore of paramount importance to accurately estimate maintenance cost before implementing a software project in order to better comprehend the total costs associated with developing and owing a software application. Better understanding maintenance costs will provide valuable information regarding resource planning and the appropriate time to decommission the application.The cost of maintenance is directly determined by the number of people involved in the maintenance process and the number of hours each person invests in the maintenance tasks. Thus in order to estimate maintenance cost one needs to estimate the effort invested in the maintenance process. The maintenance effort is expressed in man-hours which entails the number of ours dedicated by the maintenance team to implementing maintenance tasks. Maintenance in web applications has two main components: content maintenance and technical maintenance.Content maintenance requires performing tasks of a non-technical nature like updating product inventory and information, adding news or articles, managing blog posts, updating contact or brand and visual identity information and moderating user comments or messages. Content maintenance team staffing and therefore content maintenance effort is determined by the web application's size [1].According to [1] and as presented in Table 1, content maintenance cost is determined by the number of hours required to keep the web application up to date in terms of content. The larger the application the more hours need to be invested in keeping it up to date in terms of content. The more content changes in an application the more technical maintenance tasks are generated. Technical maintenance tasks are generated because content managers spot bugs or request new functionality to help keep the content up to date. Therefore, content update frequency is a factor that impacts maintenance effort and cost.Technical maintenance requires adding new functionality, performing regular back-ups, monitoring website outages, checking IP reputation, checking DNS configuration, test website speed, check for broken links, perform software updates if third party software was used when developing the web application, monitor traffic statistics and review search engine indexing.According to [1] and as presented in Table 2, technical team stuffing is determined by the level of complexity built into the web application. Thus, a Basic web application which is characterized by static content build mainly using front-end technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript will require no more than 1 person to perform maintenance tasks. A Dynamic web application which stores its content in a database and has functionality which is powered by PHP, Java, ASP.NET, Python, Ruby or any other high-level programming language will require 1 to 2 persons to perform maintenance tasks. …

The Rapid growth of internet resulted in feature rich and dynamic web applications. This increase in features also introduced completely under estimated attack vectors. Cross site scripting attacks, SQL Injection and malicious file execution are the most dominant classes of web vulnerabilities reported by OWASP 2011. These attacks make use of vulnerabilities in the code of web applications, resulting in serious consequences, such as theft of cookies, passwords and other personal credentials. It is caused by scripts, which do not sanitize user input. Several server-side counter measures for XSS attacks do exist, but such techniques have not been universally applied, because of their deployment overhead. The existing client-side solutions degrade the performance of client's system resulting in a poor web surfing experience. We present automata-based symbolic string analyses (XHunter)for automatic verification of string manipulating programs we compute the pre and post conditions of common string functions using deterministic finite automata (DFAs). Experiment result shows that our approach finds large number of malicious attacks in web application.

Chapter 3 - JavaBeans and Forms

An increasing number of libraries and information centers are using content management (CM) applications to develop, redesign, and maintain their websites. the purpose of this research was to provide understanding of attitudes of academic librarians about how their utilization of CM technology influences the information services they provide at the academic library’s website and to examine their perceptions of how using CM affects the creation of the web content. This research applied a qualitative research design (electronic survey and in-depth semi-structured interviews of academic subject librarians) with elements of a quantitative approach. the study discussed the concept of web authorship and supplied fundamentals for future theoretical research about authorship in web content development at academic libraries. the study provided an overview of CM at academic libraries and explored characteristics of dynamic content and semantic web applications at their websites. It discussed librarians’ opinions about issues of migration to the new content management system (CMS), factors affecting its efficient employment, and roles of librarians in web content management. Results of this study will serve to future research on management behavior of academic librarians authoring web content with the help of CM. the findings about the difficulties observed in the use of CMS and solutions, influence of training and learning, importance of cooperation and communication, adjustment of the CMS to the users’ needs, qualifications and skills needed in application of CM, distribution of responsibilities in the use of CMS, features of the CMS, and requirements to its functionality will have implications for academic and other libraries applying CM.

In software testing, different testers focus on different aspects of the software such as functionality, performance, design, and other attributes. While many tools and coverage metrics exist to support testers at the code level, not much support is targeted for testers who want to inspect the output of a program such as a dynamic web application. To support this category of testers, we propose a family of output-coverage metrics (similar to statement, branch, and path coverage metrics on code) that measure how much of the possible output has been produced by a test suite and what parts of the output are still uncovered. To do that, we first approximate the output universe using our existing symbolic execution technique. Then, given a set of test cases, we map the produced outputs onto the output universe to identify the covered and uncovered parts and compute output-coverage metrics. In our empirical evaluation on seven real-world PHP web applications, we show that selecting test cases by output coverage is more effective at identifying presentation faults such as HTML validation errors and spelling errors than selecting test cases by traditional code coverage. In addition, to help testers understand output coverage and augment test cases, we also develop a tool called WebTest that displays the output universe in one single web page and allows testers to visually explore covered and uncovered parts of the output.

The iData Toolkit is a toolkit that allows programmers to create interactive, type-safe, dynamic web applications with state on a high level of abstraction. The key element of this toolkit is the iData element. An iData element is a form that is generated automatically from a type definition and that can be plugged in in the web page of a web application. In this paper we show how this automatic generation of forms has been implemented. The technique relies essentially on generic programming. It has resulted in a concise and flexible implementation. The kernel of the implementation can be reused for any graphical package. The iData Toolkit is an excellent demonstration of the expressive power of modern generic (poly-typical) programming techniques.

The purpose of the workis to explore the current problems and prospects of mining solution, big web data in real time, as well as the possibility of practical implementation of Web Mining technology for big web data on a practical example.Materials and methods.The study included a review of bibliographic sources on big data mining. We used Web Mining technology for associative analysis of large web data, as well as computer modeling of the practical task of transaction analysis using a general-purpose scripting language (PHP).Results.During the work, the specifics of the Data Mining technology were described, and a modern approach to the analysis of large web data –Web Mining was analyzed. A brief classification of tasks solved using Web Mining technology is given. The problem of data mining of large web data in a general-purpose scripting language (PHP) has been solved: the lack of libraries for data mining, the difficult normalization of data to the form necessary for associative analysis, interaction with the database management system. Also, an example showing an approach to the mining of large web data was implemented. Based on the understanding of Web Mining technology and the described difficulties of analyzing web data in the PHP language, methods for effectively solving the practical problem of analyzing web data based on transactions committed in a dynamic web application have been proposed. A module for associative analysis of customer transactions in the programming language PHP was developed. The module includes an intelligent data processing class. The structural scheme of the module and system architecture were developed. The constructed module allows us to solve the main part of the problem of associative analysis of large web data using Web Mining technology in order to solve the problem of identifying patterns in a large array of web data. Associative analysis of web data is much faster because of the combination of a general-purpose scripting language and an object-oriented approach.Conclusion.According to the results of the study, it can be argued that the current state of the technology for the analysis of large web data allows efficiently process data objects, identify patterns, obtain hidden data and receive complete statistical data in real time. The results can be used both for the purpose of the initial research of technologies for analyzing large web data, and as an addition to the content management system for the intelligent analysis of web data. The usage of the technology of associative analysis and the created universal handler class makes the created module flexible, while the possibility of manual integration makes this module universal. With manual integration, the database management system is not important. Algorithm methods work with selected data. This factor greatly simplifies the further development of program code.

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Query understanding is essential in modern relevance systems, where user queries are often short, ambiguous, and highly context-dependent. Traditional approaches often rely on multiple task-specific Named Entity Recognition models to extract structured facets as seen in job search applications. However, this fragmented architecture is brittle, expensive to maintain, and slow to adapt to evolving taxonomies and language patterns. In this paper, we introduce a unified query understanding framework powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), designed to address these limitations. Our approach jointly models the user query and contextual signals such as profile attributes to generate structured interpretations that drive more accurate and personalized recommendations. The framework improves relevance quality in online A/B testing while significantly reducing system complexity and operational overhead. The results demonstrate that our solution provides a scalable and adaptable foundation for query understanding in dynamic web applications.

Development of a web-resource today is a very frequent and not always simple task. Especially if we are not talking about a static one-page website, but about a dynamic web application with an unlimited number of pages, as well as the ability to withstand heavy loads, typical of such projects. To solve these problems, there are very few ready-made solutions. Of the best ones, perhaps, only WebDSL can be distinguished, but even it has a number of drawbacks inherited from the Java project implementation language, such as, for example, low flexibility, high performance costs and the need to install a java-machine. The development process was carried out using a relatively low-level C++ general purpose programming language, which saved the project from the problems that its competitors faced, ensured high interpreter performance and cross-platform system-wide. The authors described in detail the selected means of the meta-management of the access rights of the BlockSet project, as well as the syntax of their use in the declarative highly abstract subject-oriented language BML, using simple and accessible examples to demonstrate the conciseness, but the constructiveness of the selected syntax solutions. The results obtained are of great value, as they significantly simplify the further process of administering a web resource, which is also one of the main tasks of the BlockSet project. Thus, the BML language, together with the system of access rights, provides flexible, powerful, and at the same time fairly simple and understandable methods for organizing the required system, which corresponds to the project’s paradigms on flexibility and a low threshold of entry, and also significantly optimizes the development process.

Analysis of SQL Query Optimization Strategies in the Context of Improving the Performance of Large Relational Databases in Dynamic Web Applications