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Towards an industrial grade IVE for Java and next generation research platform for JML

  • VSTTE 2008
  • Published:
International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Tool support for the Java Modeling Language (JML) is a very pressing problem. A main issue with current tools is their architecture; the cost of keeping up with the evolution of Java is prohibitively high, e.g., Java 5 has yet to be fully supported. This paper presents JmlEclipse, an Integrated Verification Environment (IVE) for JML that builds upon Eclipse’s support for Java, enhancing it with preliminary versions of Runtime Assertion Checking (RAC), Extended Static Checking (ESC), Full Static Program Verification (FSPV), and symbolic execution. To our knowledge, JmlEclipse is the first IVE to support such a full range of verification techniques for a mainstream language. We present the original tool architecture as well as an improved design based on use of the JML Intermediate Representation (JIR), which helps decouple JmlEclipse from the internals of its base compiler. As a result, we believe that JmlEclipse is easier to maintain and extend. Use of JIR as a tool exchange format is also described.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dependable Software Research Group (DSRG), Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Patrice Chalin, Perry R. James & George Karabotsos

  2. SAnToS Laboratory, Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA

    Robby & Jooyong Lee

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  1. Patrice Chalin
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  2. Robby
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  4. Jooyong Lee
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  5. George Karabotsos
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Correspondence to Patrice Chalin.

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Chalin, P., Robby, James, P.R. et al. Towards an industrial grade IVE for Java and next generation research platform for JML. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 12, 429–446 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-010-0164-8

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