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Efficient execution of web navigation sequences

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Abstract

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. While this approach has its advantages, it suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses and/or a high degree of parallelism. In this paper, we outline a set of techniques to build a web navigation component able to efficiently execute web navigation sequences. These techniques detect what elements and scripts of the pages accessed during the navigation sequence are needed for the correct execution of the sequence (and, therefore, must be loaded and executed), and what parts of the pages can be discarded. The tests executed with real web sources show that the optimized navigation sequences run significantly faster and consume significantly less resources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information and Communications Technology Department, Facultad de Informática, University of A Coruña, Campus de Elviña, s/n, 15071, A Coruña, Spain

    José Losada, Juan Raposo, Alberto Pan & Paula Montoto

Authors
  1. José Losada
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  2. Juan Raposo
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  3. Alberto Pan
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  4. Paula Montoto
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Correspondence to José Losada.

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Losada, J., Raposo, J., Pan, A. et al. Efficient execution of web navigation sequences. World Wide Web 17, 921–947 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0259-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0259-8

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