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Free keywords:
Computer Science, Software Engineering, cs.SE
Abstract:
A hallmark of object-oriented programming is the ability to perform
computation through a set of interacting objects. A common manifestation of
this style is the notion of a package, which groups a set of commonly used
classes together. A challenge in using a package is to ensure that a client
follows the implicit protocol of the package when calling its methods.
Violations of the protocol can cause a runtime error or latent invariant
violations. These protocols can extend across different, potentially
unboundedly many, objects, and are specified informally in the documentation.
As a result, ensuring that a client does not violate the protocol is hard.
We introduce dynamic package interfaces (DPI), a formalism to explicitly
capture the protocol of a package. The DPI of a package is a finite set of
rules that together specify how any set of interacting objects of the package
can evolve through method calls and under what conditions an error can happen.
We have developed a dynamic tool that automatically computes an approximation
of the DPI of a package, given a set of abstraction predicates. A key property
of DPI is that the unbounded number of configurations of objects of a package
are summarized finitely in an abstract domain. This uses the observation that
many packages behave monotonically: the semantics of a method call over a
configuration does not essentially change if more objects are added to the
configuration. We have exploited monotonicity and have devised heuristics to
obtain succinct yet general DPIs. We have used our tool to compute DPIs for
several commonly used Java packages with complex protocols, such as JDBC,
HashSet, and ArrayList.
