Crawling rich internet applications: the state of the art

Web applications have come a long way, both in terms of adoption to provide information and services, and in terms of the technologies to develop them. With the emergence of richer and more advanced technologies such as AJAX, web applications have become more interactive, responsive and user friendly. These applications, often called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), changed the web applications in two ways: (1) dynamic manipulation of clientside state and (2) asynchronous communication with the server. However, at the same time, such techniques also introduced new challenges. One important challenge is the difficulty of automatically crawling these new applications. Without crawling, RIAs cannot be indexed nor tested automatically. Traditional Copyright c © IBM Canada Ltd., 2012. Permission to copy is hereby granted provided the original copyright notice is reproduced in copies made. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of IBM. Trademarks: IBM and AppScan are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at ”Copyright and trademark information” at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. crawlers are not able to handle these newer technologies. This paper surveys the research on addressing the problem of crawling RIAs and provides some experimental results to compare existing crawling strategies. In addition, we provide some future directions for research on crawling RIAs.