This study proposes an intelligent framework for facilitating the debugging process of script-oriented web based applications. In order to prove the effectiveness of this framework, an implementation of a prototype tool for debugging such applications containing JavaScript programs is presented. The framework, apart from being independent of any specific language, it takes into consideration the variety of issues which have direct or indirect impact on the debugging process. These issues include the nature of the run-time environment, the specific features of the languages used, the coexistence of multiple technologies on the web, the assumption of scripts dealing with the permutations of the different versions running on a variety of different platforms, and other related issues.
The new framework, to be proposed, has many advanced features making it able to cope up with the challenges introduced by the variety of factors on the web. Some of these challenges are due to the nature of the run-time environments, others are due to the nature of languages used, more others are due to the nature of scripting objects, and still others are due to the coexistence of multiple components which may be realized with different categories of languages. These challenges have arisen additional specific requirements for any debugging approach to be effective and make traditional debugging techniques and methodologies not powerful enough for debugging such applications. They also cause more categories of bugs to exist. More importantly the new framework is not tied to, or consider any specific language or run-time environment. These mean that, it can be used to guide the development of debugging tools for debugging script-oriented web applications realized with any language or even realized by multiple languages that have to coexist within one web application simultaneously. To guide the development of a debugging tool, the framework provides the architectural design of the tool. It identifies the interacting constituent parts of the tool, the purpose and the requirements of each, and the interface among them.
For the purpose of proving the effectiveness of the proposed new framework, a prototype tool for debugging web applications containing JavaScript programs was implemented. Based on the framework and to work within its context, the tool was implemented with five subsystems. These subsystems are: overall checker and scripts extractor, silent bugs identifier, debugging functionalities, interpretable and extended code re-generator, and interpreting facilitator.
As the result, it is shown that the framework is platform independent, run-time environment independent,easy to implement, and applicable for on-line and off-line debugging. Consequently, the new framework is effective enough for debugging script-oriented web based applications.