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Deep typechecking and refactoring

Authors:

Sorin LernerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 43, Issue 10

Pages 37 - 52

https://doi.org/10.1145/1449955.1449768

Published: 19 October 2008 Publication History

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Abstract

Large software systems are typically composed of multiple layers, written in different languages and loosely coupled using a string-based interface. For example, in modern web-applications, a server written in Java communicates with a database back-end by passing in query strings. This widely prevalent approach is unsafe as the analyses developed for the individual layers are oblivious to the semantics of the dynamically constructed strings, making it impossible to statically reason about the correctness of the interaction. Further, even simple refactoring in such systems is daunting and error prone as the changes must also be applied to isolated string fragments scattered across the code base.

We present techniques for deep typechecking and refactoring for systems that combine Java code with a database back-end using the Java Persistence API [10]. Deep typechecking ensures that the queries that are constructed dynamically are type safe and that the values returned from the queries are used safely by the program. Deep refactoring builds upon typechecking to allow programmers to safely and automatically propagate code refactorings through the query string fragments.

Our algorithms are implemented in a tool called QUAIL. We present experiments evaluating the effectiveness of QUAIL on several benchmarks ranging from 3,369 to 82,907 lines of code.We show that QUAIL is able to verify that 84% of query strings in our benchmarks are type safe. Finally, we show that QUAIL reduces the number of places in the code that a programmer must look at in order to perform a refactoring by several orders of magnitude.

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Cited By

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Dhar APurandare RDhawan MRangaswamy SDi Nitto EHarman MHeymans P(2015)CLOTHO: saving programs from malformed strings and incorrect string-handlingProceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2786805.2786877(555-566)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786805.2786877
Lee BHirzel MGrimm RMcKinley K(2015)Debugging mixed-environment programs with BlinkSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.227645:9(1277-1306)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2276
Mayer PSchroeder AMurphy-Hill ESchaefer M(2013)Towards automated cross-language refactorings between Java and DSLs used by Java frameworksProceedings of the 2013 ACM workshop on Workshop on refactoring tools10.1145/2541348.2541350(5-8)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2541348.2541350
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Index Terms

Deep typechecking and refactoring
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Reliability
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Extra-functional properties
      1. Software reliability

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 43, Issue 10

September 2008

613 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1449955

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '08: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications
October 2008
654 pages
ISBN:9781605582153
DOI:10.1145/1449764
General Chair:
Gail E. Harris
Instantiated Software Inc.
,
Program Chairs:
Gregor Kiczales
University of British Columbia
,
Dirk Riehle
SAP Research
,
Andrew P. Black
Portland State University

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 October 2008

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 43, Issue 10

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Dhar APurandare RDhawan MRangaswamy SDi Nitto EHarman MHeymans P(2015)CLOTHO: saving programs from malformed strings and incorrect string-handlingProceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2786805.2786877(555-566)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786805.2786877
Lee BHirzel MGrimm RMcKinley K(2015)Debugging mixed-environment programs with BlinkSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.227645:9(1277-1306)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2276
Mayer PSchroeder AMurphy-Hill ESchaefer M(2013)Towards automated cross-language refactorings between Java and DSLs used by Java frameworksProceedings of the 2013 ACM workshop on Workshop on refactoring tools10.1145/2541348.2541350(5-8)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2541348.2541350
Holzer AZiarek LJayaram KEugster P(2012)Abstracting Context in Event-Based SoftwareTransactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development IX10.1007/978-3-642-35551-6_4(123-167)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35551-6_4
Patterson DWagner AAhmed ACong YDagand P(2023)Semantic Encapsulation using Linking TypesProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Type-Driven Development10.1145/3609027.3609405(14-28)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3609027.3609405
Weitz KKim GSrisakaokul SErnst MPăsăreanu CMarinov D(2014)A type system for format stringsProceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2610384.2610417(127-137)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2610384.2610417
Mayer PSchroeder A(2014)Automated Multi-Language Artifact Binding and Rename Refactoring between Java and DSLs Used by Java FrameworksProceedings of the 28th European Conference on ECOOP 2014 --- Object-Oriented Programming - Volume 858610.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_18(437-462)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_18
Holzer AZiarek LJayaram KEugster P(2012)Abstracting context in event-based softwareTransactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development IX10.5555/2434958.2434964(123-167)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2434958.2434964
Lee BGrimm RHirzel MMcKinley K(2012)MarcoProceedings of the 26th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_26(589-613)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_26
Jayaram KEugster PEyers DEtzion OGal AZdonik SVincent P(2011)Program analysis for event-based distributed systemsProceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Distributed event-based system10.1145/2002259.2002278(113-124)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2002259.2002278
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