Near-miss clone patterns in web applications: An empirical study with industrial systems

Tariq Muhammad, Minhaz F. Zibran, Yosuke Yamamoto, Chanchal K. Roy
2013 2013 26th IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE)  
Dynamic web pages composed of inter-woven (tangled) source code written in multiple programming languages (e.g., HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS) makes it difficult to analyze and manage clones in web applications. Despite more than a decade of research on software clones, there are not many studies towards the investigation of code clones in web applications. In this paper, we present an in-depth study on the patterns (i.e., forking and templating) of exact and near-miss code clones in two
more » ... l dynamic web applications having distinct architecture. The findings of our study confirm the believed patterns for cloning and suggest that specialized techniques and tool support are necessary for effectively managing clones in the tangled source code of dynamic web applications.
doi:10.1109/ccece.2013.6567821 dblp:conf/ccece/MuhammadZYR13 fatcat:th2ji7xe6vdffioyce6zzuxhm4