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GDist-RIA Crawler: A Greedy Distributed Crawler for Rich Internet Applications

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Networked Systems (NETYS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 8593))

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Abstract

Crawling web applications is important for indexing, accessibility and security assessment. Crawling traditional web applications is an old problem, for which good and efficient solution are known. Crawling Rich Internet Applications (RIA) quickly and efficiently, however, is an open problem. Technologies such as AJAX and partial Document Object Model (DOM) updates only make the problem of crawling RIA more time consuming to the web crawler. One way to reduce the time to crawl a RIA is to crawl a RIA in parallel with multiple computers. Previously published Dist-RIA Crawler presents a distributed breath-first search algorithm to crawl RIAs. This paper expands Dist-RIA Crawler in two ways. First, it introduces an adaptive load-balancing algorithm that enables the crawler to learn about the speed of the nodes and adapt to changes, thus better utilize the resources. Second, it present a distributed greedy algorithm to crawl a RIA in parallel, called GDist-RIA Crawler. The GDist-RIA Crawler uses a server-client architecture where the server dispatched crawling jobs to the crawling clients. This paper illustrates a prototype implementation of the GDist-RIA Crawler, explains some of the techniques used to implement the prototype and inspects empirical performance measurements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This paper only focuses on JavaScript events and leaves other client side events such as Flash events to the future studies.

  2. 2.

    http://phantomjs.org/

  3. 3.

    XMLHttpRequest is the module responsible for asynchronous calls in many popular browsers such as Firefox and Chrome. Microsoft Internet Explorer however does not use module, and instead it uses ActiveXObject.

  4. 4.

    Due to space limitation rest of code snippets in this section are omitted.

  5. 5.

    http://www.abeautifulsite.net/blog/2008/03/jquery-file-tree/

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Acknowledgments

This work is largely supported by the IBM® Center for Advanced Studies, the IBM Ottawa Lab and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). A special thank to Sara Baghbanzadeh.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Seyed M. Mirtaheri, Gregor von Bochmann & Guy-Vincent Jourdan

  2. Security AppScan® Enterprise, IBM, 770 Palladium Dr, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Iosif Viorel Onut

Authors
  1. Seyed M. Mirtaheri
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  2. Gregor von Bochmann
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  3. Guy-Vincent Jourdan
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  4. Iosif Viorel Onut
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seyed M. Mirtaheri .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Guevara Noubir

  2. Université de Rennes 1, Rennes Cedex, France

    Michel Raynal

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Mirtaheri, S.M., von Bochmann, G., Jourdan, GV., Onut, I.V. (2014). GDist-RIA Crawler: A Greedy Distributed Crawler for Rich Internet Applications. In: Noubir, G., Raynal, M. (eds) Networked Systems. NETYS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8593. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09581-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09581-3_14

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