Efficient execution of web navigation sequences

This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28795-4_15.[Abstract]: Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. While this approach has its advantages, it suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses and/or a high degree of parallelism. In this paper, we outline a set of techniques to build a web navigation component able to efficiently execute web navigation sequences. These techniques detect what elements and scripts of the pages accessed during the navigation sequence are needed for the correct execution of the sequence (and, therefore, must be loaded and executed), and what parts of the pages can be discarded. The tests executed with real web sources show that the optimized navigation sequences run significantly faster and consume significantly less resources.This research was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under projects TIN2009-14203 and TIN2010-09988-E, and the European Commission under project FP7-SEC-2007-01 Proposal N° 218223

Debugging of Web Applications with Web-TLR

Web-TLR is a Web verification engine that is based on the well-established Rewriting Logic--Maude/LTLR tandem for Web system specification and model-checking. In Web-TLR, Web applications are expressed as rewrite theories that can be formally verified by using the Maude built-in LTLR model-checker. Whenever a property is refuted, a counterexample trace is delivered that reveals an undesired, erroneous navigation sequence. Unfortunately, the analysis (or even the simple inspection) of such counterexamples may be unfeasible because of the size and complexity of the traces under examination. In this paper, we endow Web-TLR with a new Web debugging facility that supports the efficient manipulation of counterexample traces. This facility is based on a backward trace-slicing technique for rewriting logic theories that allows the pieces of information that we are interested to be traced back through inverse rewrite sequences. The slicing process drastically simplifies the computation trace by dropping useless data that do not influence the final result. By using this facility, the Web engineer can focus on the relevant fragments of the failing application, which greatly reduces the manual debugging effort and also decreases the number of iterative verifications.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2011, arXiv:1108.208

Evaluation of usage patterns for web-based educational systems using web mining

Virtual courses often separate teacher and student physically from one another, resulting in less direct feedback. The evaluation of virtual courses and other computer-supported educational systems is therefore of major importance in order to monitor student progress, guarantee the quality of the course and enhance the learning experience for the student. We present a technique for the usage evaluation of Web-based educational systems focussing on behavioural analysis, which is based on Web mining technologies. Sequential patterns are extracted from Web access logs and compared to expected behaviour

An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents

Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually. However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ? typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance; specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine

06472 Abstracts Collection - XQuery Implementation Paradigms

From 19.11.2006 to 22.11.2006, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06472 ``XQuery Implementation Paradigms'' was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Applications of concurrent access patterns in web usage mining

This paper builds on the original data mining and modelling research which has proposed the discovery of novel structural relation patterns, applying the approach in web usage mining. The focus of attention here is on concurrent access patterns (CAP), where an overarching framework illuminates the methodology for web access patterns post-processing. Data pre-processing, pattern discovery and patterns analysis all proceed in association with access patterns mining, CAP mining and CAP modelling. Pruning and selection of access pat-terns takes place as necessary, allowing further CAP mining and modelling to be pursued in the search for the most interesting concurrent access patterns. It is shown that higher level CAPs can be modelled in a way which brings greater structure to bear on the process of knowledge discovery. Experiments with real-world datasets highlight the applicability of the approach in web navigation

A Brief History of Web Crawlers

Web crawlers visit internet applications, collect data, and learn about new web pages from visited pages. Web crawlers have a long and interesting history. Early web crawlers collected statistics about the web. In addition to collecting statistics about the web and indexing the applications for search engines, modern crawlers can be used to perform accessibility and vulnerability checks on the application. Quick expansion of the web, and the complexity added to web applications have made the process of crawling a very challenging one. Throughout the history of web crawling many researchers and industrial groups addressed different issues and challenges that web crawlers face. Different solutions have been proposed to reduce the time and cost of crawling. Performing an exhaustive crawl is a challenging question. Additionally capturing the model of a modern web application and extracting data from it automatically is another open question. What follows is a brief history of different technique and algorithms used from the early days of crawling up to the recent days. We introduce criteria to evaluate the relative performance of web crawlers. Based on these criteria we plot the evolution of web crawlers and compare their performanc

Moving forward with combinatorial interaction testing

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is an efficient and effective method of detecting failures that are caused by the interactions of various system input parameters. In this paper, we discuss CIT, point out some of the difficulties of applying it in practice, and highlight some recent advances that have improved CIT’s applicability to modern systems. We also provide a roadmap for future research and directions; one that we hope will lead to new CIT research and to higher quality testing of industrial systems