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Empirical study of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects
Author(s) -
Wei Shiyi,
Xhakaj Franceska,
Ryder Barbara G.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.2334
Subject(s) - javascript , unobtrusive javascript , computer science , rich internet application , inheritance (genetic algorithm) , popularity , software , web application , programming language , empirical research , world wide web , software engineering , human–computer interaction , psychology , social psychology , biochemistry , chemistry , epistemology , gene , philosophy
Summary Despite the popularity of JavaScript for client‐side web applications, there is a lack of effective software tools supporting JavaScript development and testing. The dynamic characteristics of JavaScript pose software engineering challenges such as program understanding and security. One important feature of JavaScript is that its objects support flexible mechanisms such as property changes at runtime and prototype‐based inheritance, making it difficult to reason about object behavior. We have performed an empirical study on real JavaScript applications to understand the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects. We present metrics to measure behavior of JavaScript objects during execution (e.g., operations associated with an object, object size, and property type changes). We also investigated the behavioral patterns of observed objects to understand the coding or user interaction practices in JavaScript software. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.