Web service for monitoring user activity

Question

For my master thesis I have to develop a web service that constantly monitors user interaction in a web application (recording, for example, the most clicked buttons or the most visited pages). The main goal of this project is to generate a set of behavioral profiles.

I have some experience with web services, but I feel I need some sort of starting point with this kind of project (similar projects, existing thesis or articles). Hope someone can help.

Answer 1

Assuming you are talking about restFul web services, a good starting point would be to list down all APIs that you think you will need in terms of GET, POST, PUT, DELETE methods.

For example, you might first need a list of all the buttons, links and pages in the website you are supposed to monitor (lets say getAllItems). Then for such individual items, you need to code to capture the 'onclick', 'onbuttonpress' etc events (lets say getOnClickForButtonA). You will have to save all this information periodically in a database.

When you have enough information in the database, you can write code to read this and generate some stats out of it.

So, a set of services to gather all info. Set of services to store all this info. Set of services to analyze gathered info.

Hope this helps!