Reuse Opportunities in JavaScript applications

Abstract

JavaScript nowadays is among the most popular programming languages, used for developing web and IoT applications. Currently, the majority of JavaScript applications is reusing third-party components to acquire various functionalities. In this paper we isolate popular reused components and explore the type of functionality that is mostly being reused. Additionally, we examine whether the client applications adapt to the most recent versions of the reused components, and further study the reuse intensity of pairs of components that coexist in client applications. For this purpose, we performed a case study on 9389 components reused by 430 JavaScript applications hosted in GitHub. The results show that Compiler and Testing Frameworks are the most common types of functionality being reused, while the majority of client applications tend to adopt the recent versions of the reused components.