www.seipub.org/ie Information Engineering (IE) Volume 3, 2014 Performance and Quality Evaluation of jQuery Javascript Framework Andreas Gizas, Sotiris P. Christodoulou, Tzanetos Pomonis HPCLab, Computer Engineering & Informatics Dept., University of Patras Rion, Patras Received Jun 10, 2013; Revised Jun 21, 2013; Accepted Mar 12, 2014; Published Jun 12, 2014 © 2014 Science and Engineering Publishing Company Abstract devices. Mobile web is the name of this new field of The scope of this work is to provide a thorough web applications and JavaScript is expected to play a methodology for quality and performance evaluation of the major role in its development with the evolution of most popular JavaScript framework, the jQuery Framework, new devices and standards (ex. iPhone, Android) or as by taking into account well established software quality the heart of cross platform applications (like factors and performance tests. The JavaScript programming phonegap.com). There are also proposals for language is widely used for web programming and employing JavaScript in server-side applications increasingly, for general purpose of computing. Since the (Server-Side JavaScript Reference v1.2). growth of its popularity and the beginning of web 2.0 era, many JavaScript frameworks have become available for Due to the plethora of applications that JavaScript programming rich client-side interactions in web serves and the variety of programming needs, applications. The jQuery project and its community serve frameworks have been created in order to help both today as a major part of web programmers. The main programmers and end-users. These frameworks aim to outcome of this work is to highlight the pros and cons of be a useful tool for simplifying JavaScript code jQuery in various areas of interest and signify which and development and repeat blocks of code by using just a where the weak points of its code are. few lines and symbols. Moreover they provide clean Keywords structure, new features, cross-browser support, pre- JavaScript; Frameworks; Metrics; Comparison; jQuery; Quality build applications and plug-ins ready for use. For these reasons, JavaScript libraries and/or frameworks, have become most popular (The State of Web Introduction Development, 2010), and gain more and more friends The most popular programming language for the nowadays. The diversity of web applications as far as browser today is JavaScript (Chuan and Haining, the functionalities that web 2.0 and Ajax propose, the 2009). JavaScript was specifically designed to run in a end- user GUI, the different data collections and Web browser and, thus, JavaScript is the most suitable repositories, make these frameworks a useful tool for for the development of client-side programs. In creating rich web applications. As JavaScript language particular, JavaScript is well-suited for programming is used for more ambitious projects, frameworks to event-based user interfaces in the Web browser. All support these projects become increasingly important. main-stream Web browsers today support the Today, the most popular JavaScript frameworks execution of JavaScript natively. Along with the (called JFs from now on) for creating applications for growth of demands for more comprehensive user browsers are these six: jQuery, Prototype (with interfaces, the size and the complexity of web Scriptaculous library support), Dojo, MooTools, ExtJS applications are increasing. On the other hand, and YUI. Nowadays jQuery serves over than 60% of JavaScript is also becoming a general purpose JavaScript framework users and is by far, the most computing platform for browsers (Richards, et al, well known and used framework in this category. 2010), for office applications, for RIA frameworks (like Especially with the “War of browsers” that have Google Web Toolkit, Qooxdoo.org, Cappuccino.org) arouse, browsers develop continuously. The end-user and even program development environments (like demands change (html5, video on demand, Ajax etc.), lively-kernel.org). In the last few years, the Web was so these libraries have to develop again and again. becoming more accessible by portable and wireless Evolving of technologies, different demands of users, 12 Information Engineering (IE) Volume 3, 2014 www.seipub.org/ie new needs for new functionalities, many operating analyze the results; we outline the most important systems and the most distinctive mobile web make the outcomes and discuss them. In Chapter six, we choice difficult for choosing the appropriate propose some new metrics for in order to estimate the framework. Towards this direction, are we sure that quality of jQuery selectors, which we believe to be the jQuery is the best choice for our needs? Does it follow heart of jQuery framework. The paper is concluded the continuous evolvement of web technologies or with some intended future work. needs some more additions? Mainly, we focus on the code quality of the basic Related Work library of JavaScript frameworks and we conduct a In this section we discuss research efforts related static analysis research by using different metrics each directly or indirectly to our work. Software quality is time. Quality is being a basic factor for consideration a major research area and there is substantial literature in the case of these frameworks, especially as they are on quality metrics and on methods to assess the being used to everyday projects nowadays. For the quality of given software. Numerous studies confirm first time these JavaScript frameworks are being tested that many software metrics aggregated in software from the quality point of view, trying to find which of quality prediction models and testing methodologies, them are mature enough for production of big projects are valid predictors for quality characteristics of and satisfy the criteria of portability, maintainability, general interest like maintainability and correctness. reusability and testability (Calero, et al, 2004). Second, There are plenty of papers in software quality research we measure the performance of these frameworks and field, starting from the pioneer works of (Kafur et al. try to analyze the basic factors that may affect it. The 1985, LiLi and Cheung, 1987, Mata-Toledo and most popular combinations of operating systems, Gustafson, 1992), which suggest quality metrics or browsers, access devices (pc stations, embedded even approaches to improve software development in devices, mobile) are taken into account in order to general. Such metrics, or combination of them, measure size of data exchanged, speed of Dom Access. measure certain aspects of code and they can be Third, we conduct validation tests and we look for collected and used throughout the life cycle of security vulnerabilities for the framework. These tests software in order to give us the ability to predict or highlight pros and cons in every case. So, this paper detect poor software quality. Web engineering is a proposes new additions and probable improvements software-related field, thus these metrics can also be for the core libraries. It tries to summarize the work employed to measure the quality of web software like that is being done in the area of JavaScript frameworks and we conclude with the useful facts on what library JavaScript code and of course JavaScript frameworks. we should use in every case. There are a plethora of quality metrics that have been In the following section, some related work will be proposed and evolved during time. Some of them are presented, first regarding the quality metrics of obsolete or some others have specific weight, software and web applications on which our analysis depending on what we want to measure (IEEE Std. is based. Second, we will mention the efforts which are 1061-1998, Kaur, et al, 2009). Choosing the right being done in the performance analysis of these metrics is crucial in order to assess accurately. The frameworks, and we will present related works that authors in (Barkmann, et al, 2009) studies and have been done. Chapter three starts with an overview evaluates several software quality metrics and finds of definitions as far as the terms and technologies for correlation among them, indicating that some of them each framework is concerned and summarizes how seem to measure the same properties. Moreover, other frameworks have evolved until today. In this chapter researchers (Calero, et al, 2004, Gayatri, et al, 2009) we refer to jQuery more thoroughly, and discuss some suggest that depending on the category of software, key characteristics of JavaScript programming that we should choose different quality tests, in order to have made it so special. Then, chapter four presents improve the efficiency of metrics collected. our methodology and the basic axes of our analytical Furthermore, some researchers (Olsina and Rossi 2002, comparison based on previous efforts in the area of Jiang, et al, 2008) focus on the analysis of performance software and web analysis and metrics. The next and quality of web applications. We base our own section provides our measurements of several metrics methodology on such outcomes, in order to choose the regarding the jQuery frameworks. Furthermore we right metrics relevant to JavaScript programming 13 www.seipub.org/ie Information Engineering (IE) Volume 3, 2014 language and framework development. can be better re-programmed. Branches are caused by the use of if, else, case, default, catch, finally, && and In the literature we can find some more generic efforts ||. The Cyclomatic Complexity (C) we measure here is on comparison, evaluation and performance testing of one more than the number of edges formed by a programming languages like PHP and JSP (Trent et. branch (E), minus the number of branch nodes (N), al. 2008). As far as JavaScript performance testing is plus the number of exit points in the function (R) concerned, the author in (Ratanaworabhan et al., 2010) (return or throw).(C = E - N + R + 1). Finally, a deals with it, giving us an evaluation of benchmarks complexity metric for the whole software is its number that should be used.