Catch ; Release: An Approach to Debugging Distributed Full-Stack JavaScript Applications

摘要

Localizing bugs in distributed applications is complicated by the potential presence of server/middleware misconfigurations and intermittent network connectivity. In this paper, we present a novel approach to localizing bugs in distributed web applications, targeting the important domain of full-stack JavaScript applications. The debugged application is first automatically refactored to create its semantically equivalent centralized version by gluing together the application's client and server parts, thus separating the programmer-written code from configuration/environmental issues as suspected bug causes. The centralized version is then debugged to fix various bugs. Finally, based on the bug fixing changes of the centralized version, a patch is automatically generated to fix the original application source files. We show how our approach can be used to catch bugs that include performance bottlenecks and memory leaks. These results indicate that our debugging approach can facilitate the challenges of localizing and fixing bugs in web applications.