Departmental Papers (CIS)
Document Type
Conference Paper
Date of this Version
January 2005
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.
Keywords
behavioral interfaces, synthesis, software components, abstraction, model checking, games, learning regular languages
DownloadDate Posted: 01 November 2005
Comments
Postprint version. Copyright ACM, 2005. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL '05), pages 98-109.
Publisher URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1040305.1040314