research-article

Locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications

Authors:

Jiasu SunAuthors Info & Claims

FSE '10: Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

Pages 87 - 96

https://doi.org/10.1145/1882291.1882306

Published: 07 November 2010 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

Liu PXia QLiu KGuo JWang XLiu JGrundy JLi L(2023)Towards automated Android app internationalisation: An exploratory studyJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111559197(111559)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111559
Escobar-Velasquez CDonoso-Diaz ALinares-Vasquez M(2021)ITDroid: A Tool for Automated Detection of i18n Issues on Android Apps2021 IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MobileSoft)10.1109/MobileSoft52590.2021.00012(52-55)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/MobileSoft52590.2021.00012
Rodriguez RWang X(2021)Understanding Execution Environment of File-Manipulation Scripts by Extracting Pre-Conditions2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00048(406-410)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00048
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

FSE '10: Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

November 2010

302 pages

ISBN:9781605587912

DOI:10.1145/1882291

General Chair:
Gruia-Catalin Roman
Washington University in St. Louis, USA
,
Program Chair:
André van der Hoek
University of California, Irvine, USA

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 07 November 2010

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SIGSOFT/FSE'10

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SIGSOFT/FSE'10: 18th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 7 - 11, 2010

New Mexico, Santa Fe, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 128 submissions, 13%

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Cited By

Liu PXia QLiu KGuo JWang XLiu JGrundy JLi L(2023)Towards automated Android app internationalisation: An exploratory studyJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111559197(111559)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111559
Escobar-Velasquez CDonoso-Diaz ALinares-Vasquez M(2021)ITDroid: A Tool for Automated Detection of i18n Issues on Android Apps2021 IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MobileSoft)10.1109/MobileSoft52590.2021.00012(52-55)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/MobileSoft52590.2021.00012
Rodriguez RWang X(2021)Understanding Execution Environment of File-Manipulation Scripts by Extracting Pre-Conditions2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00048(406-410)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00048
Escobar-Velasquez COsorio-Riano MDominguez-Osorio JArevalo MLinares-Vasquez M(2020)An Empirical Study of i18n Collateral Changes and Bugs in GUIs of Android apps2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00061(581-592)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00061
Mahajan SAlameer AMcMinn PHalfond W(2020)Effective automated repair of internationalization presentation failures in web applications using style similarity clustering and search‐based techniquesSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.174631:1-2Online publication date: 6-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1746
Alameer AChiou PHalfond W(2019)Efficiently Repairing Internationalization Presentation Failures by Solving Layout Constraints2019 12th IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST)10.1109/ICST.2019.00026(172-182)Online publication date: Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST.2019.00026
Wang XChen CXing Z(2019)Domain-specific machine translation with recurrent neural network for software localizationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-019-09702-z24:6(3514-3545)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09702-z
Ruiz EAvelar RWang XChaudron MCrnkovic IChechik MHarman M(2018)Protecting remote controlling apps of smart-home-oriented IOT devicesProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings10.1145/3183440.3195101(212-213)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3183440.3195101
Mahajan SAbolhassani NMcMinn PHalfond WChaudron MCrnkovic IChechik MHarman M(2018)Automated repair of mobile friendly problems in web pagesProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3180155.3180262(140-150)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3180155.3180262
Mahajan SAlameer AMcMinn PHalfond W(2018)Automated Repair of Internationalization Presentation Failures in Web Pages Using Style Similarity Clustering and Search-Based Techniques2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST.2018.00030(215-226)Online publication date: Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST.2018.00030
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