An Integrated Approach to Static Safety of Web Applications

Henry Detmold, Katrina E. Falkner, David S. Munro, Travis Olds, Ronald Morrison, Stuart J. Norcross

Abstract: Statically ensuring safety properties of Web applications is becoming increasingly important as the Web becomes the dominant platform for the construction of large, multi-user applications. In particular, Web applications should be provided with at least the same guarantees of static safety as in preceding development paradigms; the current failure to do so leads to Web application users being forced to endure failure modes that would never be accepted from conventional applications. We introduce a categorisation of this problem area into four major safety properties. Further, we observe that these properties are interrelated, and hence adopt an integrated model for their enforcement. Based on this integrated model, we demonstrate an approach to Web application safety that is both simpler and more powerful than previous, non-integrated, approaches. In addition, this approach as implemented in our WebStore application server achieves these goals without recourse to new and unfamiliar programming constructs. Finally, benchmark results comparing our server to existing mainstream Web application development platforms demonstrate that it performs comparably for static content and is an order of magnitude faster for database applications.