Kwang-Won Sun

EventHandler-Based Analysis Framework for Web Apps Using Dynamically Collected States

JavaScript web applications (apps) are prevalent these days, and quality assurance of web apps gets even more important. Even though researchers have studied various analysis techniques and software industries have developed code analyzers for their own code repositories, statically analyzing web apps in a sound and scalable manner is challenging. On top of dynamic features of JavaScript, abundant execution flows triggered by user events make a sound static analysis difficult.

Analysis of JavaScript Programs: Challenges and Research Trends

JavaScript has been a de facto standard language for client-side web programs, and now it is expanding its territory to general purpose programs. In this article, we classify the client-side JavaScript research for the last decade or so into six topics: static analysis, dynamic analysis, formalization and reasoning, type safety and JIT optimization, security for web applications, and empirical studies. Because the majority of the research has focused on static and dynamic analyses of JavaScript, we evaluate research trends in the analysis of JavaScript first and then the other topics. Finally, we discuss possible future research directions with open challenges.