Web application transformations based on rewrite rules

During the evolution phase, the structure (pages and links) of a Web application tends unavoidably to degrade. A solution to reverse this degradation can be restructuring the Web application, but this work may take a lot of time and effort if conducted without appropriate tools. The theory of rewrite rules has been used with success in many real restructuring works on traditional software. Our idea is trying to apply rewrite rules to Web applications with the aim of restructuring them. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to describe some examples of HTML transforms improving the quality of Web applications, to present some details about the implementation of a tool, based on rewrite rules, that can help designers in Web application restructuring, and to describe the results obtained on some real world applications. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.