A Strategy for Efficient Crawling of Rich Internet Applications

This thesis studies the problem of crawling rich internet applications. These applications are built using advanced web technologies which allow them to be more dynamic and enable better user experiences. In recent years, the popularity and importance of web applications has continually increased and they are now very commonly used to complete essential tasks such as financial transactions. As a result, the need to crawl these applications goes beyond the desire to index content for search. For example, applications also need to be analyzed in order to detect security vulnerabilities and assess accessibility. In this thesis, the challenges involved with crawling rich internet applications are discussed and an efficient strategy for crawling these applications is presented. We also use this strategy to develop a prototype tool for crawling AJAX-based applications.