JavaScript is widely used in web-based applications and is increasingly popular with developers. So-called browser wars in recent years have focused on JavaScript performance, specifically claiming comparative results based on benchmark suites such as SunSpider and V8. In this paper we evaluate the behavior of JavaScript web applications from commercial web sites and compare this behavior with ...

Modern web applications make extensive use of JavaScript, which is now estimated to be one of the most widely used languages in the world. Callbacks are a popular language feature in JavaScript. However, they are also a source of comprehension and maintainability issues. We studied several features of callback usage across a large number of JavaScript applications and found out that over 43% of...

JavaScript is widely used in web-based applications, and gigabytes of JavaScript code are transmitted over the Internet every day. Current efforts to compress JavaScript to reduce network delays and server bandwidth requirements rely on syntactic changes to the source code and content encoding using gzip. In this paper, we consider reducing the JavaScript source code to a compressed abstract sy...

In today’s web applications, JavaScript code interacts with the Document Object Model (DOM) at runtime. This runtime interaction between JavaScript and the DOM is errorprone and challenging to test. In order to unit test a JavaScript function that has read/write DOM operations, a DOM instance has to be provided as a test fixture. This DOM fixture needs to be in the exact structure expected by t...

Interoperability between statically typed and dynamically typed languages is increasingly important, as can be witnessed by the many statically typed languages targeting JavaScript. Interoperating with both the object-oriented and functional features of JavaScript is essential, if only to manipulate the DOM, yet existing languages have very poor support for this. We present Scala.js, a dialect ...

The use of JavaScript for web applications has increased in recent years due to its short learning curve, maintainability, and ease of portability across different mobile operating systems. However, the performance of dynamic-typed languages such as JavaScript significantly lag behind their corresponding C/C++ native code. Recent advances in JavaScript compilers have resulted in notable improve...

We present an overview of three research projects that all aim to provide better tools for JavaScript web application programmers: TAJS, which infers static type information for JavaScript applications using dataflow analysis; JSRefactor, which enables sound code refactorings; and Artemis, which provides high-coverage automated testing. 1. JAVASCRIPT PROGRAMMERS NEED

JavaScript is widely used in web-based applications and is increasing popular with developers. So-called browser wars in recent years have focused on JavaScript performance, specifically claiming comparative results based on benchmark suites such as SunSpider and V8. In this paper we evaluate the behavior of JavaScript web applications from commercial web sites and compare this behavior with th...

JavaScript provides useful client-side computation facilities, enabling richer and more dynamic web applications. Unfortunately, the power and ubiquity of JavaScript has also been exploited to launch various browser-based attacks. Our previous work proposed a theoretical framework applying policy-based code instrumentation to JavaScript. This paper further reports our experience carrying out th...