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

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. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.