Client-tier Validation of Dynamic Web Applications

Web applications pervade all aspects of human activity today. Rapid growth in the scope, penetration and user-base of web applications, over the past decade, has meant that web applications are substantially bigger, more complex and sophisticated than ever before. This places even more demands on the validation process for web applications. This paper presents a case study of the validation of Ajax web Applications, where a combination of dynamic crawling-based model generation and back-end model checking is used to comprehensively validate the client-tier of the web application. Our experience shows that such an approach is not only practical in the context of applications of such size and complexity but can provide greater automation and better coverage than current industrial validation practices based on testing. A couple of experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.