ISBN: 978-981-11-3671-9 DOI: 10.18178/wcse.2017.06.036
FireInSight: Understanding JavaScript Behaviors in Web Pages by Visually Exploring the Browser
Abstract— As Web programming standards and browser infrastructures have matured, the implementation
of UIs for many Web sites has seen a parallel increase in complexity. In order to deal with this problem, we
are researching ways to bridge the gap between the browser view of a UI and its JavaScript implementation.
To achieve this, we propose a novel JavaScript reverse-engineering approach and a Firebug extension called
FireInSight. This approach helps to relate the semantically meaningful elements in the browser to the lowerlevel
JavaScript syntax, by leveraging context available during the script execution. The approach uses runtime
tracing to build a dynamic, context-sensitive, control-flow model that provides feedback to developers
as a summary of tracing information. To demonstrate the applicability of the approach we present a study of
an existing open-source Web 2.0 application called the Java Pet Store.
Index Terms— Reverse-Engineering, Software Maintenance, Rich Internet Applications, JavaScript
Peng Li
Beijing Institute of Technology, CHINA
Cite: Peng Li, "FireInSight: Understanding JavaScript Behaviors in Web Pages by Visually Exploring the Browser," Proceedings of 2017 the 7th International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering, pp. 209-213, Beijing, 25-27 June, 2017.