BabelRef: Detection and renaming tool for cross-language program entities in dynamic web applications

In a dynamic web application, client-side code is often dynamically generated from server-side code. Client-side program entities such as HTML presentation elements and Javascript functions/variables are embedded within server-side string literals or variables´ values. However, existing tools for code maintenance such as automatic renaming support only work for program entities in a single language on either the server side or the client side. In this paper, we introduce BabelRef, a novel tool that is able to automatically identify and rename client-side program entities and their references that are embedded within server-side code.