Towards Automatic Client-Side Feature Reuse

Client-side applications often contain similar features and facilitating reuse could offer considerable benefits in terms of faster development. Unfortunately, due to the specifics of prevailing technologies, the techniques and tools used to support reuse are not as advanced as in other software engineering disciplines and the main method of reuse is still copy-pasting code. Copy-paste reuse can introduce a number of different types of errors that are time-consuming to detect and fix. In this paper we present an automatic method for feature reuse in clientside web applications. We identify problems that occur when introducing code from one application into another, present a set of algorithms that detect and fix those problems and perform the actual code merging. We have evaluated the approach on four case study applications, and the results show that the method is capable of performing feature reuse.