Self-healing Middleware Support for Django Web Applications

Abstract: Using web frameworks is becoming more common to build modern websites. Therefore, the robustness and resilience of the web frameworks are critical in production. Automatic software repair is about the software resolving the bugs automatically by itself. A web framework equipped with automatic software repair can improve the resilience of the website at runtime. In this thesis, we investigate the possibility of repairing common web framework errors such as URL interpretation error and database error with self-healing techniques during runtime. The common web framework errors are analyzed by using 16 popular open-sourceweb framework projects from Github. Besides, the self-healing architecture and techniques are implemented in the web framework to resolve the exceptions during runtime. The flexibility and robustness are considered while designing the self-healing techniques. The metrics regarding effectiveness and performance overhead are concerned with evaluating the self-healing techniques. The designed self-healing techniques are found to have resolved entirely the URL interpretation error and partially resolved the database error on two web framework projects. The performance overhead with self-healing techniques has obviously affected both two web framework projects. However, the performance overhead varies depending on the errors and projects. Furthermore, we find that the metrics are enough to evaluate the self-healing techniques while dealing with errors during runtime.