Aske Simon Christensen

Precise analysis of string expressions

We perform static analysis of Java programs to answer a simple question: which values may occur as results of string expressions? The answers are summarized for each expression by a regular language that is guaranteed to contain all possible values. We present several applications of this analysis, including statically checking the syntax of dynamically generated expressions, such as SQL queries. Our analysis constructs flow graphs from class files and generates a context-free grammar with a nonterminal for each string expression. The language of this grammar is then widened into a regular language through a variant of an algorithm previously used for speech recognition. The collection of resulting regular languages is compactly represented as a special kind of multi-level automaton from which individual answers may be extracted. If a program error is detected, examples of invalid strings are automatically produced. We present extensive benchmarks demonstrating that the analysis is efficient and produces results of useful precision.

Adding trace matching with free variables to AspectJ

An aspect observes the execution of a base program; when certain actions occur, the aspect runs some extra code of its own. In the AspectJ language, the observations that an aspect can make are confined to the current action: it is not possible to directly observe the history of a computation.Recently, there have been several interesting proposals for new history-based language features, most notably by Douence et al. and by Walker and Viggers. In this paper, we present a new history-based language feature called tracematches that enables the programmer to trigger the execution of extra code by specifying a regular pattern of events in a computation trace. We have fully designed and implemented tracematches as a seamless extension of AspectJ.A key innovation in our tracematch approach is the introduction of free variables in the matching patterns. This enhancement enables a whole new class of applications in which events can be matched not only by the event kind, but also by the values associated with the free variables. We provide several examples of applications enabled by this feature.After introducing and motivating the idea of tracematches via examples, we present a detailed semantics of our language design, and we derive an implementation from that semantics. The implementation has been realised as an extension of the abc compiler for AspectJ.

abc: an extensible AspectJ compiler

Research in the design of aspect-oriented programming languages requires a workbench that facilitates easy experimentation with new language features and implementation techniques. In particular, new features for AspectJ have been proposed that require extensions in many dimensions: syntax, type checking and code generation, as well as data flow and control flow analyses.The AspectBench Compiler (abc) is an implementation of such a workbench. The base version of abc implements the full AspectJ language. Its frontend is built, using the Polyglot framework, as a modular extension of the Java language. The use of Polyglot gives flexibility of syntax and type checking. The backend is built using the Soot framework, to give modular code generation and analyses.In this paper, we outline the design of abc, focusing mostly on how the design supports extensibility. We then provide a general overview of how to use abc to implement an extension. Finally, we illustrate the extension mechanisms of abc through a number of small, but non-trivial, examples. abc is freely available under the GNU LGPL.

Extending Java for high-level Web service construction

We incorporate innovations from the <bigwig> project into the Java language to provide high-level features for Web service programming. The resulting language, JWIG, contains an advanced session model and a flexible mechanism for dynamic construction of XML documents, in particular XHTML. To support program development we provide a suite of program analyses that at compile time verify for a given program that no runtime errors can occur while building documents or receiving form input, and that all documents being shown are valid according to the document type definition for XHTML 1.0.We compare JWIG with Servlets and JSP which are widely used Web service development platforms. Our implementation and evaluation of JWIG indicate that the language extensions can simplify the program structure and that the analyses are sufficiently fast and precise to be practically useful.

Optimising aspectJ

AspectJ, an aspect-oriented extension of Java, is becoming increasingly popular. However, not much work has been directed at optimising compilers for AspectJ. Optimising AOP languages provides many new and interesting challenges for compiler writers, and this paper identifies and addresses three such challenges.First, compiling around advice efficiently is particularly challenging. We provide a new code generation strategy for around advice, which (unlike previous implementations) both avoids the use of excessive inlining and the use of closures. We show it leads to more compact code, and can also improve run-time performance. Second, woven code sometimes includes run-time tests to determine whether advice should execute. One important case is the cflow pointcut which uses information about the dynamic calling context. Previous techniques for cflow were very costly in terms of both time and space. We present new techniques to minimise or eliminate the overhead of cflow using both intra- and inter-procedural analyses. Third, we have addressed the general problem of how to structure an optimising compiler so that traditional analyses can be easily adapted to the AOP setting.We have implemented all of the techniques in this paper in abc, our AspectBench Compiler for AspectJ, and we demonstrate significant speedups with empirical results. Some of our techniques have already been integrated into the production AspectJ compiler, ajc 1.2.1.

abc : the aspectbench compiler for aspectJ

abc is an extensible, optimising compiler for AspectJ. It has been designed as a workbench for experimental research in aspect-oriented programming languages and compilers. We outline a programme of research in these areas, and we review how abc can help in achieving those research goals.

A Runtime System for XML Transformations in Java

We show that it is possible to extend a general-purpose programming language with a convenient high-level data-type for manipulating XML documents while permitting (1) precise static analysis for guaranteeing validity of the constructed XML documents relative to the given DTD schemas, and (2) a run-time system where the operations can be performed efficiently. The system, named XACT, is based on a notion of immutable XML templates and uses XPath for deconstructing documents. A companion paper presents the program analysis; this paper focuses on the efficient runtime representation.