Scenario Driven Approach to API Generation for B/S Web Application

Abstract

Now there are trillions of web applications and the number is still increasing quickly. These web applications contain large amounts of data and functions which are useful. However, the data and functions cannot be shared and reused because these web applications do not provide proper APIs. We can encapsulate the data and function API through recording Web browser events and replaying these operations case by case, but the difficulty and workload of behavior simulation is high. This paper proposes a scenario driven approach to API generation for B/S web application, which can be used to encapsulate the data/function APIs of different web applications semi-automatically. First, we introduce the formal definition of API generation. Second, we illustrate the generation algorithm. The experiment on a real-world web application demonstrate the feasibility, effectiveness and benefits of our approach.