Technical Report 2002-010

Automated Analysis of Dynamic Web Services

Jonas Boustedt

March 2002

Abstract:
For a web application test-engineer, it would be convenient to have a map, in form of a graph, describing the functional topology of the application. In that way, it would be possible to analyse the possible paths which can be navigated to discover redundancies and circularities for example. A web spider tool can automate the construction of such a graph. The spider can request a document from the application, find all references to other documents in it, and explore them recursively until all the references have been analysed. However, web services often produce dynamic responses which means that the content cannot be distinctly represented by its reference, i.e., the responses must be classified in a way that matches the users perception. The main problem is to find suitable criteria for this classification. This study describes how to make such a tool and it surveys ideas for how to create a classifying identifier for dynamic responses. The implemented spider was used to make experiments on selected web services, using different models for web node identification. The result is a proposal of suitable criteria for classification of dynamic responses, coming from web applications. These criteria are implemented in algorithms which use the parse structure and the set of internal references as the dominant terms of identification.

Note: M.Sc. thesis

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