Abstract
The state of the practice in object-oriented software development has moved beyond reuse of code to reuse of conceptual structures such as design patterns. This paper draws attention to some difficulties that need to be solved if this style of development is to be supported by formal methods. In particular, the centrality of object interactions in many designs makes traditional reasoning less useful, since classes cannot be treated fruitfully in isolation from one another. We propose some ideas towards dealing with these issues: a relational model of heap structure capable of expressing sharing and mutual influence between objects; a declarative specification style that works in the presence of collaboration; and a tool-supported constraint analysis to expose problems in a diagram that captures, at a design level, a pattern of interaction. We illustrate these ideas with an example taken from a program used in the formatting of this paper.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
M. Fayad and D. Schmid, Object-Oriented Application Frameworks, Special Issue, Communications of the ACM, 40(10), October 1997.
E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides, Design Patterns, Addison Wesley, 1995
R. Helm, I. M. Holland, and D. Gangopadhyay. Contracts: Specifying Behavioral Compositions in Object Oriented Systems. European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming / ACM SIGPLANConfer ence on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, Ottawa, Canada, Vol. 1, June 1990, 169–180.
C. A. R. Hoare. Proof of correctness of data representations. Acta Informatica, 1(4):271–81, 1972.
Daniel Jackson. Object Models as Heap Invariants. In: Carroll Morgan and Annabelle McIver (eds.), Essays on Programming Methodology, Springer Verlag, 2000.
Daniel Jackson. Automating first-order relational logic. ACM SIGSOFT Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering, San Diego, California, November 2000.
Daniel Jackson. Alloy: A Lightweight Object Modelling Notation. To appear, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, October 2001.
Daniel Jackson, Ilya Shlyakhter and Manu Sridharan. A Micromodularity Mechanism. ACM SIGSOFT Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering / European Software Engineering Conference, Vienna, Austria, September 2001.
Daniel Jackson, Ian Schechter and Ilya Shlyakhter. Alcoa: the Alloy Constraint Analyzer. International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, June 2000.
Daniel Jackson & Mandana Vaziri. Finding Bugs with a Constraint Solver. International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Portland, Oregon, August 2000.
Daniel Jackson and Jeannette Wing. Lightweight Formal Methods. In: H. Saiedian (ed.), An Invitation to Formal Methods, IEEE Computer, 29(4):16–30, April 1996.
Gary T. Leavens. An overview of Larch/C++: Behavioral specifications for C++ modules. In: H. Kilovand W. Harvey (eds.), Specification of Behavioral Semantics in ObjectOriented Information Modeling, Amsterdam, Holland, 1996, Kluwer, pp.121–142.
Gary T. Leavens, Albert L. Baker, and Clyde Ruby. JML: A Notation for Detailed Design. In: Haim Kilov, Bernhard Rumpe, and Ian Simmonds (eds.), Behavioral Specifications of Businesses and Systems, Kluwer, 1999, Chapter 12, pp. 175–188.
K. Rustan M. Leino. Toward Reliable Modular Programs. Ph.D. thesis, California Institute of Technology, January 1995.
K. Rustan M. Leino, Greg Nelson, and James B. Saxe. ESC/Java User’s Manual. Technical Note 2000-002, Compaq Systems Research Center, October 2000.
Barbara Liskovwith John Guttag. Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design. Addison-Wesley, 2001.
Bertrand Meyer. Object-Oriented Software Construction (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall, 1997.
Robert O’Callahan. Generalized Aliasing as a Basis for Program Analysis Tools. PhD thesis. Technical Report CMU-CS-01-124, School of Computer Science, Carnegie mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, May 2001.
G. Ramalingam, Alex Warshavsky, John Field and Mooly Sagiv. Toward Effective Component Verification: Deriving an Efficient Program Analysis from a High-level Specification. Unpublished manuscript.
James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson and Grady Booch. The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
M. Sagiv, T. Reps, and R. Wilhelm. Parametric Shape Analysis via 3-Valued Logic. ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, San Antonio, Texas, Jan. 20-22, 1999, ACM, New York, NY, 1999.
Allison Waingold. Lightweight Extraction of Object Models from Bytecode. Masters thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, May 2001.
John Whaley and Martin Rinard. Compositional Pointer and Escape Analysis for Java Programs. ACM SIGPLANConfer ence on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, Denver, Colorado, November 1999.
The Bandera Project. Kansas State University. http://www.cis.ksu.edu/santos/bandera/.
The SLAM Project. Microsoft Research. http://www.research.microsoft.com/projects/slam/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jackson, D., Fekete, A. (2001). Lightweight Analysis of Object Interactions. In: Kobayashi, N., Pierce, B.C. (eds) Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software. TACS 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2215. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45500-0_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45500-0_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42736-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45500-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive