Automated analysis of dynamic web services

Web applications appear as mazes to a user. Using a web browser, the user explores each web page without seeing the structure of the entire service. For a software tester, it would be convenient to have a map, in form of a graph, describing the functional topology of the service. 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, nd 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 classi ed in a way that matches the users perception. The main problem is to nd suitable criteria for this classi cation. This study describes how to make such a tool and it surveys ideas for how to create a classifying identi er for dynamic responses. The implemented spider was used to make experiments on selected web services, using di erent models for web node identi cation. The result is a proposal of suitable criteria for classi cation 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 identi cation.