A Framework for Understanding Web Publishing Applications

We address in this paper the reverse engineering issue in the Web applications. The maintenance process of this kind of applications is often hardly performed due to the lack of documentation. In most cases, the documentation associated to the Web application does not exist or rarely complete and up-to-date. We aim to present a solution which describes the structure of Web application in order to gain their better understanding and so facilitate their maintenance. We describe a method to infer Web publishing programs, specifically defined as database-driven programs producing dynamic documents. We address a typical reverse engineering situation where the program is a “black box” that takes a database instance (the input) and produces a dynamic document (the output). Our method attempts to understand and describe the program.