WebDiff is a web-based and generic differencing service, designed to support the comparison of various types of software artifacts. To achieve the required level of independence from the specific characteristics of the examined software artifacts, WebDiff employs a generic domain-independent tree differencing algorithm (VTracker) that is able to handle any kind of XML document representing a partially-ordered labeled tree.

The architecture of WebDiff is shown below:

Currently, WebDiff offers three types of software differencing services:

1. Comparison of two different source code versions.
2. Comparison of two different UML diagram versions (in the form of XMI files).
3. Comparison of a source code version against UML diagrams.

WebDiff Service

• WebDiff has been developed using ICEfaces 1.8 (an Ajax JavaServer Faces component library) and is accessible through any web browser at http://hypatia.cs.ualberta.ca:8084/WebDiff/
• WebDiff source code

Related Papers

• Nikolaos Tsantalis, Natalia Negara, and Eleni Stroulia, "WebDiff: A Generic Differencing Service for Software Artifacts," pp. 586-589, 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'2011), Tool Demonstration Session, Williamsburg, VA, USA, September 25-30, 2011.