Program Transformations for Web Application Restructuring

This chapter aims at providing a presentation of the principles and techniques involved in the (semi-)automatic transformation of Web applications, in several different restructuring contexts. The necessary background knowledge is provided to the reader in the sections about the syntax of the multiple languages involved in Web application development and about the role of restructuring in a highly dynamic and rapidly evolving development environment. Then, specific examples of Web restructuring are described in detail. In the presentation of the transformations required for restructuring, as well as in the description of the grammar for the involved languages, TXL (Cordy, Dean, Malton & Schneider, 2002) and its programming language is adopted as a unifying element. The chapter is organized into the following sections: in the section following the Introduction, the problems associated with the analysis of the multiple languages used with Web applications are discussed. Then, the process of Web application restructuring is considered. Three examples of Web restructuring are described in more detail in the next three sections (design restructuring, migration of a static Web site to a dynamic Web application, consistency among monolingual portions of a multilingual Web site). Related works and concluding remarks are at the end of the chapter.