Synthesis of interface specifications for Java classes

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Synthesis of interface specifications for Java classes (2005)

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by Rajeev Alur , P. Madhusudan , Wonhong Nam

Venue:	In POPL
Citations:	142 - 9 self

BibTeX

@INPROCEEDINGS{Alur05synthesisof,
    author = {Rajeev Alur and P. Madhusudan and Wonhong Nam},
    title = {Synthesis of interface specifications for Java classes},
    booktitle = {In POPL},
    year = {2005},
    pages = {98--109}
}

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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.

Keyphrases

java class interface specification safety property typical software component partial-information two-player game correct sequencing temporal specification computationally-hard problem symbolic graph symbolic representation general way predicate abstraction symbolic model branching-time logic finite state-transition system sample java2sdk library class novel solution sound approach finite automaton input output type synthesis method

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