Varis: IDE support for embedded client code in PHP web applications

Abstract

In software development, IDE services such as syntax highlighting, code completion, and jump to declaration are used to assist developers in programming tasks. In dynamic web applications, however, since the client-side code is dynamically generated from the server-side code and is embedded in the server-side program as string literals, providing IDE services for such embedded code is challenging. In this work, we introduce Varis, a tool that provides editor services on the client-side code of a PHP-based web application, while it is still embedded within server-side code. Technically, we first perform symbolic execution on a PHP program to approximate all possible variations of the generated client-side code and subsequently parse this client code into a VarDOM that compactly represents all its variations. Finally, using the VarDOM, we implement various types of IDE services for embedded client code including syntax highlighting, code completion, and jump to declaration. The video demonstration for Varis is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1TECeRXGrg.