JavaScript Code Quality Analysis Master’s Thesis Joost-Wim Boekesteijn JavaScript Code Quality Analysis THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE in COMPUTER SCIENCE by Joost-Wim Boekesteijn born in Hoogeveen, the Netherlands Software Engineering Research Group m-industries Department of Software Technology M-Industries BV Faculty EEMCS, Delft University of Technology Rotterdamseweg 183c Delft, the Netherlands Delft, the Netherlands www.ewi.tudelft.nl www.m-industries.com c 2012 Joost-Wim Boekesteijn. JavaScript Code Quality Analysis Author: Joost-Wim Boekesteijn Student id: 1174355 Email:
[email protected] Abstract Static analysis techniques provide a means to detect software errors early in the development process, without actually having to run the software that is being analyzed. These techniques are common for statically typed languages and have found their way into IDEs such as Eclipse and Visual Studio. However, applying the same techniques to dynamically typed languages is much less common. Tool support is less mature and the amount of published research is relatively small. For this project, we design and build a static analyis tool for JavaScript code. We start by giving background information on relevant parts of the JavaScript language, followed by a survey of existing tools and research. In the design of our analysis tool, we achieved a clear separation of responsibilities between the different modules for parsing, analysis, rule definition and reporting. The level of detail in the default reporter makes our tool an ideal candidate for integration in a JavaScript IDE. On the other hand, our tool is also suited for batch analysis of large code collections.