Over the last few years, the complexity of web applications has increased to provide more dynamic web applications to users. The drawback of this complexity is the growing number of errors in the front-end applications. In this paper, we present BikiniProxy, a novel technique to provide self-healing for the web. BikiniProxy is designed as an HTTP proxy that uses five self-healing strategies to rewrite the buggy HTML and Javascript code. We evaluate BikiniProxy with a new benchmark of 555 reproducible Javascript errors, DeadClick. We create DeadClick by randomly crawling the Internet and collect all web pages that contain Javascript errors. Then, we observe how BikiniProxy heals those errors by collecting and comparing the traces of the original and healed pages. To sum up, BikiniProxy is a novel fully-automated self-healing approach that is specific to the web, evaluated on 555 real Javascript errors, and based on original self-healing rewriting strategies for HTML and Javascript.
We present a technique to make applications resilient to failures. This technique is intended to maintain a faulty application functional in the field while the developers work on permanent and radical fixes. We target field failures in applications built on reusable components. In particular, the technique exploits the intrinsic redundancy of those components by identifying workarounds consisting of alternative uses of the faulty components that avoid the failure. The technique is currently implemented for Java applications but makes little or no assumptions about the nature of the application, and works without interrupting the execution flow of the application and without restarting its components. We demonstrate and evaluate this technique on four mid-size applications and two popular libraries of reusable components affected by real and seeded faults. In these cases the technique is effective, maintaining the application fully functional with between 19 and 48 of the failure-causing faults, depending on the application. The experiments also show that the technique incurs an acceptable runtime overhead in all cases. Despite the best design practices and testing techniques, many faults exist and manifest themselves in deployed software. In this paper we propose a self-healing framework that aims to mask fault manifestations at runtime in Java applications by automatically applying workarounds. The framework integrates a checkpoint-recovery mechanism to restore a consistent state after the failure, and a mechanism to replace the Java code at runtime to apply the workaround.