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A declarative approach for Java code instrumentation

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Abstract

Source instrumentation plays an important role in dynamic program analysis. However, current instrumentation implementations require programmers to write ad hoc rules that are often too complex to use and maintain. To address this complexity, we divide the task of source instrumentation into two steps: first, the source points are queried, into which code fragments should be planted; secondly, the code fragments including contextual information are generated and planted into source code through the queried points. According to this idea, we present a new method based on declarative code queries, which makes it easier to specify instrumentations using contextual information collected from expressive code queries. The JIns language provided by our method is constructed following an SQL-like style, which is well known and widely used by programmers. We evaluate the method in terms of the reduced complexity of instrumentation specifications for several common instrumentation tasks.

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Notes

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  3. http://www.w3.org/

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61003025, No. 61021062) and the National 863 High-Tech Programme of China (No. 2011AA010103, No. 2012AA011205).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Tian Zhang, Jianhua Zhao & Xuandong Li

  2. School of Information Technology, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China

    Xiaomei Zheng

  3. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute, Beijing, China

    Yan Zhang

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  1. Tian Zhang
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  2. Xiaomei Zheng
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  3. Yan Zhang
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  4. Jianhua Zhao
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  5. Xuandong Li
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Correspondence to Tian Zhang.

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Zhang, T., Zheng, X., Zhang, Y. et al. A declarative approach for Java code instrumentation. Software Qual J 23, 143–170 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-013-9220-4

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