Modern web applications consist of a significant amount of clientside code, written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. In this paper, we present a study of common challenges and misconceptions among web developers, by mining related questions asked on Stack Overflow. We use unsupervised learning to categorize the mined questions and define a ranking algorithm to rank all the Stack Overflow questions based on their importance. We analyze the top 50 questions qualitatively. The results indicate that (1) the overall share of web development related discussions is increasing among developers, (2) browser related discussions are prevalent; however, this share is decreasing with time, (3) form validation and other DOM related discussions have been discussed consistently over time, (4) web related discussions are becoming more prevalent in mobile development, and (5) developers face implementation issues with new HTML5 features such as Canvas. We examine the implications of the results on the development, research, and standardization communities.

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JavaScript is a scripting language that plays a prominent role in modern web applications. It is dynamic in nature and interacts heavily with the Document Object Model (DOM) at runtime. These characteristics make providing code completion support to JavaScript programmers particularly challenging. We propose an automated technique that reasons about existing DOM structures, dynamically analyzes the JavaScript code, and provides code completion suggestions for JavaScript code that interacts with the DOM through its APIs. Our automated code completion scheme is implemented in an open source tool called DOMPLETION. The results of our empirical evaluation indicate that (1) DOM structures exhibit patterns, which can be extracted and reasoned about in the context of code completion suggestions; (2) DOMPLETION can provide code completion suggestions with a recall of 89%, precision of 90%, and an average time of 2.8 seconds.

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