Title: Model Based Crawling of Rich Internet Applications

Abstract
Rich internet applications (RIAs) are built using advanced web technologies like AJAX which allow them to be more dynamic and enable better user experiences. In recent years, the popularity and importance of RIAs have continually increased and they are now very commonly used to complete essential tasks such as financial transactions. As a result, the need to crawl these applications goes beyond the desire to index content for search. For example, applications also need to be analyzed in order to detect security vulnerabilities and assess accessibility. In this seminar, the challenges involved with crawling rich internet applications are discussed and an efficient strategy for crawling these applications is
presented. The seminar discusses a new methodology called “model-based crawling” that can be used to design efficient crawling strategies for crawling RIAs. When designing strategies we aim at discovering new states as soon as possible by minimizing the number of events executions. A strategy that is designed based on the principles of model-based crawling is also presented. The performance of the strategy is compared with Breadth-First and Depth-First crawling strategies on two real RIAs as well as on test applications. The results show that the strategy is more efficient than Breadth-First and Depth-First strategies which are widely used for crawling RIAs.