Locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications

Xiaoyin Wang, Lu Zhang, Tao Xie, Hong Mei, Jiasu Sun

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Software internationalization aims to make software accessible and usable by users all over the world. For a Java application that does not consider internationalization at the beginning of its develop- ment stage, our previous work proposed an approach to locating need-to-translate constant strings in the Java code. However, when being applied on web applications, it can identify only constant strings that may go to the generated HTML texts, but cannot further distinguish constant strings visible at the browser side (need-to-translate) from other constant strings (not need-to-translate). In this paper, to address significant challenges in internationalizing web applications, we propose a novel approach to locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications. Among those constant strings that may go to the generated HTML texts, our approach further distinguishes strings visible at the browser side from non-visible strings via a novel technique called flag propagation. We evaluated our approach on three real-world open source PHP-based web applications (in total near 17 KLOC): Squirrel Mail, Lime Survey, and Mrbs. The empirical results demonstrate that our approach accurately distinguishes visible strings from non-visible strings among all the constant strings that may go to the generated HTML texts, and is effective for locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 18th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE-18
Pages87-96
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event18th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE-18 - Santa Fe, NM, United States
Duration: Nov 7 2010Nov 11 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Other

Other18th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE-18
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Fe, NM
Period11/7/1011/11/10

Keywords

  • flag propagation
  • software internationalization
  • web application

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this