Martin P. Robillard
Gail C. Murphy
Abstract
Exception-handling mechanisms in modern programming languages provide a means to help software developers build robust applications by separating the normal control flow of a program from the control flow of the program under exceptional situations. Separating the exceptional structure from the code associated with normal operations bears some consequences. One consequence is that developers wishing to improve the robustness of a program must figure out which exceptions, if any, can flow to a point in the program. Unfortunately, in large programs, this exceptional control flow can be difficult, if not impossible, to determine.In this article, we present a model that encapsulates the minimal concepts necessary for a developer to determine exception flow for object-oriented languages that define exceptions as objects. Using these concepts, we describe why exception-flow information is needed to build and evolve robust programs. We then describe Jex, a static analysis tool we have developed to provide exception-flow information for Java systems based on this model. The Jex tool provides a view of the actual exception types that might arise at different program points and of the handlers that are present. Use of this tool on a collection of Java library and application source code demonstrates that the approach can be helpful to support both local and global improvements to the exception-handling structure of a system.
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Index Terms
- Static analysis to support the evolution of exception structure in object-oriented systems
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Chenglie Hu
In object-oriented development environments, software developers have historically had difficulty determining propagated exception types and the reasons for unintended exceptions being caught. This problem may be due to type subsumption or simply to poor documentation, but it affects the developer's ability to devise recovery procedures or to report unhandled exceptions constructively. This paper, by Robillard and Murphy, considers a static analysis tool, Jex, which is used to provide exception flow information for Java programs. The exception flow analysis is presented at both the local level (caught exceptions) and global level (the propagation path). More specifically, Jex takes an input set of Java source files, and produces a human-readable file for each class that shows the formatted view of the exception flow for each method of a class. The model used by Jex is based on an earlier (1993) work on Ada. The implementation of Jex is based on an extension to the code of an open source Java compiler. The architecture of Jex is organized around four processes: parsing and type-checking source files, extracting exception flows, performing class-hierarchy analysis to determine dynamic bindings, and loading Jex files for querying. Situations that require identification of actual exception objects (such as whether an exception thrown in a handler is the same as the one that would be caught by the catch clause) are currently outside the scope of Jex. Three existing software packages were analyzed using Jex, and the results are reported. Online Computing Reviews Service
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