Building a Web Application

WebWriter: A browser-based editor for constructing Web applications

Web application development from simple web pages to complex interactive platforms (including social networks, e-commerce systems, corporate portals) requires new approaches, tools and technologies. JavaScript libraries and frameworks play a special role in developing web applications, simplifying the creation of effective, scalable, and convenient interfaces. The purpose of the article is to research the problems and prospects of using React in combination with Redux when creating web applications with a complex structure, to assess the advantages of their joint use in comparison with similar tools and to develop the web application “FarmerProducts”. The research methodology consists of the main methodological approaches and technological tools for developing web applications. Such methods, in particular, are: system and comparative analysis – to identify the features of creating web applications; method of expert assessments, which involves the study of literary sources and information resources, conducting interviews and surveys of experts, as well as the processes of developing and testing scalable and high-performance web applications based on the use of React and Redux. The scientific novelty of the research is the analysis of modern tools (React, Angular, Vue. js) for developing web applications, identifying problems and prospects for their use, creating an author’s web application (using React and Redux), which includes an intuitive interface, a flexible database, simplifying the process of working with the application by using a stack of modern technologies. Conclusions. The paper analyses the problems and prospects of using modern web application development tools; focuses on React, which is suitable for different projects; conducts a comparative analysis of React with Angular, Vue. js and Svelte, identifies their main characteristics, advantages, disadvantages; demonstrates the dependence of the choice of tools on the project context (React in combination with Redux can provide an optimal balance between performance, flexibility and scalability); describes the author’s web application – the FarmerProducts online store; identifies further ways to improve this web application.

A relevant consequence of the expansion of the web and e-commerce is the growth of the demand of new web sites and web applications. As a result, web sites and applications are usually developed without a formalized process, and web pages are directly coded in an incremental way, where new pages are obtained by duplicating existing ones. Duplicated web pages, having the same structure and just differing for the data they include, can be considered as clones. The identification of clones may reduce the effort devoted to test, maintain and evolve web sites and applications. Moreover, clone detection among different web sites aims to detect cases of possible plagiarism. In this paper we propose an approach. based on similarity metrics, to detect duplicated pages in web sites and applications, implemented with HTML language and ASP technology. The proposed approach has been assessed by analyzing several web sites and Web applications. The obtained results are reported in the paper with respect to some case studies.

Internet contains a tremendous amount of valuable web applications that can be used in many systems. To use this kind of applications with other systems, the interaction needs to be in a standard structured format such as XML web service. In this paper, we present a method to convert the current web applications into standard XML web services. The system design and implementation are presented. We applied the proposed system on two test cases: Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) course online schedule and Wiley product search engine.

An unlimited keyboard support is one of the main accessibility requirements for web pages and web applications. But it is not sufficient that the user can perform all actions on the page using the keyboard. In addition designers of web sites or web applications have to make sure that keyboard users can use their pages with acceptable performance. We present GOMS models for mouse and keyboard navigation in web pages and web applications. These models can be used to compare keyboard navigation with mouse navigation. Such a comparison allows us to decide if the amount of keyboard support for a web page or web application is sufficient or if there is an unacceptable disadvantage for keyboard users.

The medical and technology fields are rapidly advancing, leading many people to use computers to help diagnose, prevent, and treat human diseases. One major issue in the medical world is the imbalance between the number of patients and doctors. Additionally, most people lack medical training, so when experiencing symptoms of a disease, it is often difficult to immediately know the correct steps to take. Eye diseases vary in severity, ranging from mild to severe. One common eye disorder affecting many people is refractive error, which generally falls into two categories: hyperopia (farsightedness) and myopia (nearsightedness). Early detection of symptoms related to refractive errors requires accurate and prompt diagnosis. Therefore, with the rapid development of technology, it is essential to develop systems capable of early detection of eye diseases, especially refractive errors, by using technology that mimics human expert capabilities, such as expert systems. This expert system integrates expert knowledge within two main environments: the development environment and the consultation environment, helping the community diagnose diseases more easily and efficiently. For example, the use of the Certainty Factor method in expert systems enables the calculation of diagnostic certainty levels based on the combination of symptoms reported by patients and expert knowledge, achieving a confidence level of up to 96.7%. This demonstrates that expert system technology can be a valuable tool in addressing the imbalance between patients and doctors while improving access to faster and more accurate diagnoses. To build such systems, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET provides a complete set of tools for developing ASP.NET web applications, XML Web Services, desktop applications, and mobile applications. Within Visual Studio, .NET programming languages such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C# (CSharp), and Visual J# (JSharp) are used in a unified integrated development environment (IDE), enabling developers to efficiently share tools and resources to create reliable and user-friendly expert system applications. The system was developed and tested using symptom data from 40 patients collected at the Tanjung Sarang Elang Community Health Center. The testing showed a diagnostic accuracy of up to 96.7% in detecting symptoms of both hyperopia and myopia.

The advantage of many web publishing tools is the flexibility for the user to arrange the available widgets and modules. Nevertheless, the freedom to insert and arrange components in the creation of web pages sometimes leads the designer to make usability and/or accessibility mistakes that emerge only after the interface has been built and subjected to automatic, semi-automatic or manual evaluation processes. Several systems include features to perform accessibility controls of the web sites implemented, analyzing syntactic properties rather that provide guidelines to control the usability metrics. In this work, we propose a methodology to develop web interfaces that integrates the advantages of a top–down approach to implement HTML pages with functionalities to perform usability controls analyzing an abstraction level of formal specification based upon Symbol-Relation Action grammars (SR-Action grammars, for short) (Cassino and Tucci, Information Systems: People, Organizations, Institutions, and Technologies, 2009). In particular, the visual models adopted to develop both the static characteristics and the interactive tasks of the web application, makes more intuitive the design and the development. Again, a SR-Action grammar defining the scenes of the implemented site is used to control a subset of the Nielsen heuristics at abstraction level: completeness, correctness, aesthetic and minimalist design, user control, consistency, and metrics desirable in an interactive visual interface. The analysis at formal level and the report of the usability controls allow the designer to run feedback reviews of the visual environment under consideration and to perform usability evaluation before of the canonical testing techniques. Then, we describe an implementation prototype of the development environment born of the integration of two systems previously realized: TAGIVE (Cassino et al., WSEAS Trans Inform Sci Appl J, 2006) and VALUTA (Cassino and Tucci, Information Systems: People, Organizations, Institutions, and Technologies, 2009).

This article describes the use of SAS/IntrNet to evaluate and enhance university level web‐based courses. Since the release of SAS/IntrNet in October 1997, a number of major corporations and government agencies such as Ford Credit, National Semiconductor, and Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences have implemented SAS/IntrNet for their intranet and internet servers (SAS Institute, 1997). IntrNet provides the ability to create both static and dynamic Web pages. The product uses web‐publishing tools to convert SAS output to hypertext markup language (html) for the creation of static Web pages.

With conventional regression test tools for Web applications, it is difficult to specify the values to be verified that are repeated output inside loop statements. We need to select each of these values displayed in Web pages with the mouse. This paper presents a method that automates regression testing of Web applications on the server side. This method makes it easy to specify values to be verified and enables us to specify them when we develop Web applications. We can directly check the verification results on the Web pages that are shown in the Web browser. If we find a fault, we can even directly modify a part of the server program in the Web browser that corresponds to the currently displayed Web page.

It is possible to create interactive, responsive web applications that allow user-generated contributions. However, the relevant technologies have to be explicitly deployed by the authors of the web pages. In this work we present the concept of parasitic and symbiotic web applications which can be deployed on arbitrary web pages by means of a proxy-based application platform. Such applications are capable of inserting, editing and deleting the content of web pages. We use an HTTP proxy in order to insert JavaScript code on each web page that is delivered from the web server to the browser. Additionally we use a database server hosting user-generated scripts as well as high-level APIs allowing for implementing customized web applications. Our approach is capable of cooperating with existing web pages by using shared standards (e.g. formatting of the structure on DOM level) and common APIs but also allows for user-generated (parasitic) applications on arbitrary web pages without the need for cooperation by the page owner.

Web Applications (WAs) are complex systems and it is difficult to understand their architecture without proper documentation. Due to high pressure of meeting deadlines and short time to market, WAs are liable to be poorly structured and are rarely well documented. Even if documentation is present, it often does not comply with code because code is updated without updating documentation. This leads to problems during maintenance. To improve understanding of a system, attempts can be made to recover architecture from the source code by analyzing the relations and dependencies between a system's components. Architecture of WAs revolves around its web pages (WPs). In this paper, we present a tool for extracting relations between WPs within WAs. WAFE is capable of extracting a large number of relations, and uses combination of procedural language analysis and object oriented language analysis along with WP identifiers (name terms). Another important feature of WAFE tool is its language independence i.e. one can make it functional for any server side language by writing a few regular expressions.

An integrated fuzzy logic and web-based framework for active protocol support

In recent years, the World Wide Web has become an ideal platform for developing Internet applications. World Wide Web service and application engineering is a complex task. Many web applications at present are large-scale and involve hundreds or thousands of web pages and sophisticated interactions with users and databases. Thus, improving the quality of web applications and reducing development costs are important challenges for the Internet industry. One way to resolve the difficulty is to provide web application developers with an integrated development environment. In this paper, I propose an efficient methodology and development environment for web application programs. This environment includes a design model to represent data and navigational structure, a modeling language for the notation technique of the design model, and a process model to define development stages.

Software testing is indispensable to assure software quality. Traditional software testing techniques are insufficient for modern web applications due to their unique characteristics, such as highly dynamic generation of web pages and interactions with DOM elements. Meanwhile, existing web testing techniques are cumbersome to use in long-term maintenance and evolution because the tests are often brittle in the presence of fast changes to web pages. In this paper, we propose an automatic test generation technique for dynamic web applications. Our technique effectively decouples test code from web pages by automatically generating page objects. Based on page objects, our technique performs iterative feedback directed random test generation. Our evaluation on seven real-world web applications demonstrates that the proposed technique achieves reasonable code coverage (from 23.3% to 90.8%) and can effectively explore dynamically generated web pages (around 14.7 times more than the original static web pages), revealing hundreds of HTML issues and five real errors in the applications.

The development of new mobile services can benefit from adopting XML Web services technologies, because this can dramatically reduce the time to market for many types of mobile services. However, it is often believed that XML Web services will become too large a bottleneck in service performance, rendering the service unusable, as well as it can compromise service usage due to lack of security features. This paper provides a thorough study of these topics, i.e., a study of the typical performance of mobile services built on top of XML Web services, how security features can be introduced for these services and how these security features influence on the performance of services. The results of this paper should apply to any mobile services implementation based on XML Web services technologies.