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Specifying and checking method call sequences of Java programs

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Abstract

In a pre and postcondition-style specification, it is difficult to specify the allowed sequences of method calls, referred to as protocols. The protocols are essential properties of reusable object-oriented classes and application frameworks, and the approaches based on the pre and postconditions, such as design by contracts (DBC) and formal behavioral interface specification languages (BISL), are being accepted as a practical and effective tool for describing precise interfaces of (reusable) program modules. We propose a simple extension to the Java Modeling Language (JML), a BISL for Java, to specify protocol properties in an intuitive and concise manner. The key idea of our approach is to separate protocol properties from functional properties written in pre and post-conditions and to specify them in a regular expression-like notation. The semantics of our extension is formally defined and provides a foundation for implementing runtime checks. Case studies have been performed to show the effectiveness our approach. We believe that our approach can be adopted by other BISLs.

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Notes

  1. Applets are Java classes that are embedded in HTML documents, and clients of applets are Web browsers and applet viewers.

  2. The set statement is treated as a Java statement and thus can appear only in a place where a Java statement is allowed. There are sporadic discussions in the JML community to add support for manipulating ghost fields in Java interface definitions. However, no noticeable progress has been made yet in terms of language definition and implementation.

  3. In Java, there is no separate open method for streams, and stream objects become open automatically when they are created.

  4. In JML, one can mix formal and informal text in a specification (Leavens and Baker, 1999).

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-0509299 and by the University of Texas at El Paso under URI grant 14-5078-6151. Thanks to Myoung Kim and anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, 79968, USA

    Yoonsik Cheon & Ashaveena Perumandla

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  1. Yoonsik Cheon
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  2. Ashaveena Perumandla
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Correspondence to Yoonsik Cheon.

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Cheon, Y., Perumandla, A. Specifying and checking method call sequences of Java programs. Software Qual J 15, 7–25 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-006-9001-4

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