A Model-Based Approach for Crawling Rich Internet Applications

New Web technologies, like AJAX, result in more responsive and interactive Web applications, sometimes called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Crawling techniques developed for traditional Web applications are not sufficient for crawling RIAs. The inability to crawl RIAs is a problem that needs to be addressed for at least making RIAs searchable and testable. We present a new methodology, called “model-based crawling”, that can be used as a basis to design efficient crawling strategies for RIAs. We illustrate model-based crawling with a sample strategy, called the “hypercube strategy”. The performances of our model-based crawling strategies are compared against existing standard crawling strategies, including breadth-first, depth-first, and a greedy strategy. Experimental results show that our model-based crawling approach is significantly more efficient than these standard strategies.