Synthesis of Interface Specifications for Java Classes
Files
Penn collection
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
behavioral interfaces
synthesis
software components
abstraction
model checking
games
learning regular languages
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Contributor
Abstract
While a typical software component has a clearly specified (static) interface in terms of the methods and the input/output types they support, information about the correct sequencing of method calls the client must invoke is usually undocumented. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for automatically extracting such temporal specifications for Java classes. Given a Java class, and a safety property such as "the exception E should not be raised", the corresponding (dynamic) interface is the most general way of invoking the methods in the class so that the safety property is not violated. Our synthesis method first constructs a symbolic representation of the finite state-transition system obtained from the class using predicate abstraction. Constructing the interface then corresponds to solving a partial-information two-player game on this symbolic graph. We present a sound approach to solve this computationally-hard problem approximately using algorithms for learning finite automata and symbolic model checking for branching-time logics. We describe an implementation of the proposed techniques in the tool JIST- Java Interface Synthesis Tool- and demonstrate that the tool can construct interfaces accurately and efficiently for sample Java2SDK library classes.