Abstract
User Interface Web Design Patterns are standard solutions for the development of web applications. The recovery of these patterns from web applications supports program comprehension, reusability, reverse engineering, re-engineering, and maintenance of legacy web applications. The recovery of patterns from web applications becomes arduous due to the heterogeneous nature of web applications. Authors presented different catalogs and recovery approaches for extracting User Interface Web Design Patterns from source code in last one and half decade. There is still a lack of formal specifications for web design patterns, which are important for their recovery from source code. The objective of this paper is to specify User Interface Web Design Patterns (UIWDP) using semiformal specification technique and use these specifications for the recovery of patterns from the source code of web applications using regular expressions. 55 feature types are identified for the specification of 15 UIWDPs. We evaluated our approach on 75 randomly selected web applications and recovered 15 UIWDPs. The standard deviation, precision, recall and F-score measures are used to evaluate the accuracy of our approach.
Highlights
The World Wide Web has surprisingly affected many aspects of our life and it will continuously influence society
A number of techniques and tools are presented for recovering information from web applications, but they are not capable enough to deal with the heterogeneous nature of web applications completely
We present an approach that can recover User Interface Web Design Patterns (UIWDP) from LWAs with their necessary attributes such as filename, line number, numbers of matches per file, etc
Summary
The World Wide Web has surprisingly affected many aspects of our life and it will continuously influence society. Due to increasing popularity and use of web applications (WAs) in all fields of life, the WAs are subject to continuous evolution, maintenance and re-engineering [1], [10]. WAs demand continuous evolution due to different reasons such as improvement in usability, quality, efficiency, correction of bugs, introducing the new functionality and modifications in legacy WAs [22], [27]. The appropriate use of UIWEDPs creates consistency among different web pages of web applications, but it establishes efficient layout of web pages [3]-[6]. The automatic recovery of UIWDPs supports comprehension, maintenance, evolution and reengineering activities
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