Monitor for HTML- and JavaScript?-based Web Applications

To analyse the usage of an HTML- and JavaScript?-based web application with AutoQUEST, the usage of the website must be recorded. For this, AutoQUEST provides a so called monitor. The monitor is a standalone application for Java on Linux based on a Webserver that does both

• provide a JavaScript? integrated into a website to record the user actions
• receive the recorded user actions from the JavaScript? via AJAX and store them into local logfiles

Installation of the Monitor

To install the monitor, it must first be downloaded. As AutoQUEST is under continuous development, it is always good to download the latest tested version from our continous integration environment which is available ​here. There, just download the autoquest-htmlmonitor-version-bin.tar.gz.

Afterwards, the tar-file needs to be extracted to a preferred location. The resulting folder structure will look as follows:

• autoquest-htmlmonitor-version
  • data
    • robots
      • robotsfilter.txt
  • lib
    • <some libraries (jar-files)>
  • autoquest-htmlmonitor-version.jar
  • run.sh
  • stop.sh
  • isRunning.sh

After the first start of the monitor, a further folder called log will be added. In this folder, the logfiles will be stored. The log directory can be changed using start parameters for the monitor (see next Section).

Starting and Stopping the Monitor

To start the monitor, change into the installation directory and type ./run.sh. The monitor will run in the background. To check, if the monitor is running, type ./isRunning.sh. To stop the monitor, you can type ./stop.sh. Per default, the monitor logs the recorded actions into a directory named log. To change this directory, you can start the monitor with a parameter denoting the path to the intended log directory. For example, to log into the directory myLogDir, the monitor must be started with the command ./run.sh myLogDir.

When started, the monitor listens on 8090 per default. To check, if the monitor is listening on the port, you can type wget localhost:8090/script/autoquest-htmlmonitor.js. As a result, the monitor should respond with the JavaScript? for recording user actions. To change the port, you can provide a different port as the second parameter to the run.sh command. For example, to log into the directory log and to listen on port 8099 the monitor must be started using the command ./run.sh log 8099.