Recording and Replaying Navigations on AJAX Web Sites

Recording and replaying user navigations greatly simplifies the testing process of web applications and, consequently, greatly contributes to improving usability, robustness and assurance of these applications. Implementing such replaying functionalities with modern web technologies such as AJAX is very hard: the GUI may change dynamically as a result of a myriad of different events beyond the control of the replaying machinery and even locating a given GUI element across different executions may be impossible. In this work we propose a tool that overcomes these problems and is able to handle real-world web sites based on AJAX technology. Recording occurs automatically, i.e., the user navigates with a normal browser and need not take any specific action. Replaying a previously recorded trace occurs programmatically, based on several heuristics that make the tool robust with respect to DOM variance while at the same time maintaining the ability to detect whether replaying has become impossible---perhaps because the target web site has changed too much since the recording. The entire procedure is fully transparent to the target web site. We also describe the use of our tool on several web applications including Facebook, Amazon and others

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness