Implementing Automatic Error Recovery Support for Rich Web Clients

Abstract

The way developers usually implement recoverability in object oriented applications is by delegating the backward error recovery logic to the ever-present database transactions, discarding the in-memory object graphwhen something goes wrong and reconstructing its previous version from the repository. This is not elegant from the point of view of design,but a cheap and efficient way to recover the system from an error. In some architectures like RIA, the domain logic is managed in the client without that resource, and the error prone and complex recoverability logic must be implemented manually, leading to a tangled and obfuscated code. An automatic recovery mechanism is adapted to that architecture by means of a JavaScript implementation. We developed several benchmarks representing common scenarios to measure the benefits and costs of this approach, evidencing the feasibility of the automatic recovery logic but an unexpected overhead of the chosen implementation of AOP for JavaScript.