Roundtrip Engineering of Ajax Applications

Abstract

Roundtrip engineering is an approach where models and source code are refined by iteratively conducting forward and reverse engineering. It enables more efficient development of software, e.g. through reducing development time, and is especially said to be effective for applications that have frequent changes in requirements, such as Web applications. Imazeki, et al., have proposed an approach for realizing roundtrip engineering for Web applications. However, current roundtrip engineering approaches and tools cannot handle Ajax applications. The main reason for this is the main characteristic of Ajax, which is the asynchronous processing between clients and server. We propose an approach that realizes roundtrip engineering for Ajax applications. Our approach is implemented on top of a roundtrip engineering tool for Web applications proposed by Imazeki. We show a case study as well as an experimental result to show the effectiveness of our tool. The experimental result showed that our tool was able to reduce the time to conduct a maintenance task by 25%.