DoDOM: Leveraging DOM Invariants for Web 2.0 Application Reliability

Web 2.0 applications are increasing in popularity and are being widely adopted. However, they are prone to errors due to their non-deterministic behavior and the lack of error-detection mechanisms on the client side. This paper presents DoDOM, an automated system for detecting errors in a Web~2.0 application using dynamic analysis. DoDOM repeatedly executes the application under a given sequence of user actions and observes its behavior. Based on the observations, DoDOM extracts a set of invariants on the web application’s DOM structure. We show that invariants exist for real applications and can be learned within a reasonable number of executions. We further demonstrate the use of the invariants in detecting errors in web applications due to failures of events and the unavailability of domains.