Abstract not found

While a number of research systems have demonstrated the potential value of program transformations, very few of these systems have made it into practice. The core technology for such systems is well understood; what remains is integration and more importantly, the problem of handling the scale of the applications to be processed. This paper describes DMS, a practical, commercial program analysis and transformation system, and sketches a variety of tasks to which it has been applied, from redocumenting to large-scale system migration. Its success derives partly from a vision of design maintenance and the construction of infrastructure that appears necessary to support that vision. DMS handles program scale by careful space management, computational scale via parallelism

A new method is presented for analyzing and reengineering class hierarchies. In our approach, a class hierarchy is processed along with a set of applications that use it, and a fine-grained analysis of the access and subtype relationships between objects, variables and class members is performed. The result of this analysis is again a class hierarchy, which is guaranteed to be behaviorally equivalent to the original hierarchy, but in which each object only contains the members that are required. Our method is semantically well-founded in concept analysis: the new class hierarchy is a minimal and maximally factorized concept lattice that reflects the access and subtype relationships between variables, objects and class members. The method is primarily intended as a tool for finding imperfections in the design of class hierarchies, and can be used as the basis for tools that largely automate the process of reengineering such hierarchies. The method can also be used as a space-optimizing source-to-source transformation that removes redundant fields from objects. A prototype implementation for Java has been constructed, and used to conduct several case studies. Our results demonstrate that the method can provide valuable insights into the usage of the class hierarchy in a specific context, and lead to useful restructuring proposals.

The structure of object-oriented systems typically forms a complicated, tangled web of interdependent classes. Understanding this implicit and hidden structure poses severe problems to developers and maintainers who want to use, extend or adapt those systems. This paper advocates the use of a logic meta-language to express and extract structural relationships in class-based object-oriented systems. As validation the logic meta-language SOUL was implemented and used to construct a declarative framework that allows reasoning about the structure of Smalltalk programs. The declarative framework's usefulness is illustrated by expressing di#erent high-level structural relationships such as those described by design patterns. 1:

A software (design) pattern describes a general solution for a recurring design problem. The solution is mostly described in terms of an abstract design structure expressed in design elements such as classes, methods and relationships (inheritance, associations). This paper describes a prototype tool that supports working with design patterns when developing or maintaining object-oriented programs. The tool provides three integrated views on a program: the code (classes, methods, etc.), a design view (abstraction of the code plus additional information not in the code) and occurrences of design patterns in the program. The tool assists developers using patterns in three ways: . Generating program elements (e.g. classes, hierarchies) for a new instance of a pattern, taken from an extensible collection of "template" patterns . Integrating pattern occurrences with the rest of the program by binding program elements to a role in a pattern (e.g. indicating that an existing class plays a p...

Grammarware comprises grammars and all grammar-dependent software, i.e., software artifacts that directly involve grammar knowledge. The term grammar is meant here in the widest sense to include XML schemas, syntax definitions, interface descriptions, APIs, and interaction protocols. The most obvious examples of grammar-dependent software are document processors, parsers, import/export functionality, and generative programming tools. Even though grammarware is so omnipresent, it is somewhat neglected --- from an engineering point of view. We lay out an agenda that is meant to promote research on improving the quality of grammarware and on increasing the productivity of grammarware development.

Abstract. Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing programs without changing their functionality. These notes cover refactoring in functional languages, using Haskell as the medium, and introducing the HaRe tool for refactoring in Haskell. 1

Abstract. Binary component adaptation (BCA) allows components to be adapted and evolved in binary form and on-the-fly (during program loading). BCA rewrites component binaries before (or while) they are loaded, requires no source code access and guarantees release-to-release compatibility. That is, an adaptation is guaranteed to be compatible with a new binary release of the component as long as the new release itself is compatible with clients compiled using the earlier release. We describe our implementation of BCA for Java and demonstrate its usefulness by showing how it can solve a number of important integration and evolution problems. Even though our current implementation was designed for easy integration with Sun’s JDK 1.1 VM rather than for ultimate speed, measurements show that the load-time overhead introduced by BCA is small, in the range of one or two seconds. With its flexibility, relative simple implementation, and low overhead, binary component adaptation could significantly

Abstract 1 Refactorings are behavior-preserving program transformations that automate design level changes in object-oriented applications. Our previous research established that many schema transformations, design patterns, and hotspot meta-patterns are automatable. This research evaluates whether refactoring technology can be transferred to the mainstream by restructuring non-trivial C++ applications. The applications that we examine were evolved manually by software engineers. We show that an equivalent evolution could be reproduced significantly faster and cheaper by applying a handful of general-purpose refactorings. In one application, over 14K lines of code were transformed automatically that otherwise would have been coded by hand. Our experiments identify benefits, limitations, and topics of further research related to the transfer of refactoring technology to a production environment. 1.

Object-oriented programming promises to increase programmer productivity through better reuse of existing code. However, reuse is not yet pervasive in today's object-oriented programs. Why is this so? We argue that one reason is that current programming languages and environments assume that components are perfectly coordinated. Yet in a world where programs are mostly composed out of reusable components, these components are not likely to be completely integrated because the sheer number of components would make global coordination impractical. Given that seemingly minor inconsistencies between individually designed components would exist, we examine how they can lead to integration problems with current programming language mechanisms. We discuss several reuse mechanisms that can adapt a component in place without requiring access to the component's source code and without needing to re-typecheck it.