Web Application fact extractor (WAFE)

Web Applications (WAs) are complex systems and it is difficult to understand their architecture without proper documentation. Due to high pressure of meeting deadlines and short time to market, WAs are liable to be poorly structured and are rarely well documented. Even if documentation is present, it often does not comply with code because code is updated without updating documentation. This leads to problems during maintenance. To improve understanding of a system, attempts can be made to recover architecture from the source code by analyzing the relations and dependencies between a system's components. Architecture of WAs revolves around its web pages (WPs). In this paper, we present a tool for extracting relations between WPs within WAs. WAFE is capable of extracting a large number of relations, and uses combination of procedural language analysis and object oriented language analysis along with WP identifiers (name terms). Another important feature of WAFE tool is its language independence i.e. one can make it functional for any server side language by writing a few regular expressions.