Automated Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces
Hani Samir Girgis;
Abstract
The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming an important medium for business growth because of its pervasiveness. The migration of existing applications to the web is a core problem in software reengineering, since applications are frequently deemed to be useful when their functionalities are accessible via the web. A substantial class of applications that could benefit from migration to the web is that of Java Graphical User Interface (GUI) desktop applications. An emerging approach to web migration is interaction-based reengineering, in which the user interface (UI) of the existing application is wrapped with a software layer that exports a Web accessible interface and hides the original one. A major barrier to such migration approaches is the reverse engineering of the user interface, which is usually a time consuming and highly manual
task.
We propose a new approach called GUIRE to automatically Reverse Engineer various features of a GUI from an executing Java-Swing desktop application. The approach exploits a new black box technique for reverse engineer Java-Swing User Interfaces using AspectJ, which contains aspects that weave themselves unobtrusively in the original application to extract structural and behavioral GUI representations.
In addition, we have developed Swing2Script, an interaction-reengineering approach
for automatically migrating Java-Swing applications to Ajax-enabled web-based applications. The approach uses GUIRE to reverse engineer GUI models from Java Swing GUis. Based on the extracted model, it automatically builds an Ajax-enabled front end, which drives the relevant workflows of the original application. The use of AJAX paradigm increases the responsiveness of the migrated application.
In this thesis, we try to address the problem of migrating Java GUI applications to the
web with the goal of reducing the effort and cost of such activities. We survey existing approaches for web migration and user interface reverse engineering and we will present the proposed GUI reverse engineering approach and migration approach and the middleware on which it relies.
task.
We propose a new approach called GUIRE to automatically Reverse Engineer various features of a GUI from an executing Java-Swing desktop application. The approach exploits a new black box technique for reverse engineer Java-Swing User Interfaces using AspectJ, which contains aspects that weave themselves unobtrusively in the original application to extract structural and behavioral GUI representations.
In addition, we have developed Swing2Script, an interaction-reengineering approach
for automatically migrating Java-Swing applications to Ajax-enabled web-based applications. The approach uses GUIRE to reverse engineer GUI models from Java Swing GUis. Based on the extracted model, it automatically builds an Ajax-enabled front end, which drives the relevant workflows of the original application. The use of AJAX paradigm increases the responsiveness of the migrated application.
In this thesis, we try to address the problem of migrating Java GUI applications to the
web with the goal of reducing the effort and cost of such activities. We survey existing approaches for web migration and user interface reverse engineering and we will present the proposed GUI reverse engineering approach and migration approach and the middleware on which it relies.
Other data
| Title | Automated Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces | Other Titles | الهندسة العكسية الآلية لواجهات المستخدم الرسومية | Authors | Hani Samir Girgis | Issue Date | 2007 |
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