Finding and Emulating Keyboard, Mouse, and Touch Interactions and Gestures while Crawling RIAs

Existing techniques for crawling Javascript-heavy Rich Internet Applications tend to ignore user interactions beyond mouse clicking, and therefore often fail to consider potential mouse, keyboard and touch interactions. We propose a new technique for automatically finding and exercising such interactions by analyzing and exercising event handlers registered in the DOM. A basic form of gesture emulation is employed to find states accessible via swiping and tapping. Testing the tool against 6 well-known gesture libraries and 5 actual RIAs, we find that the technique discovers many states and transitions resulting from such interactions, and could be useful for cases such as automatic test generation and error discovery, especially for mobile web applications.