Article

jContractor: A Reflective Java Library to Support Design by Contract

Authors:

Murat Karaorman,

Urs Hölzle, and

John L. BrunoAuthors Info & Claims

Reflection '99: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection

July 1999

Pages 175 - 196

Published: 19 July 1999 Publication History

Abstract

jContractor is a purely library based approach to support Design By Contract specifications such as preconditions, postconditions, class invariants, and recovery and exception handling in Java. jContractor uses an intuitive naming convention, and standard Java syntax to instrument Java classes and enforce Design By Contract constructs. The designer of a class specifies a contract by providing contract methods following jContractor naming conventions. jContractor uses Java Reflection to synthesize an instrumented version of a Java class by incorporating code that enforces the present jContractor contract specifications. Programmers enable the run-time enforcement of contracts by either engaging the jContractor class loader or by explicitly instantiating objects using the jContractor object factory. Programmers can use exactly the same syntax for invoking methods and passing object references regardless of whether contracts are present or not. Since jContractor is purely library-based, it requires no special tools such as modified compilers, modified JVMs, or pre-processors.

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Cited By

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Strickland TDimoulas CTakikawa AFelleisen M(2013)Contracts for First-Class ClassesACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/251818935:3(1-58)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2518189
Francisco MCastro LBalaban MCabot JGogolla MWilke C(2012)Automatic generation of test models and properties from UML models with OCL constraintsProceedings of the 12th Workshop on OCL and Textual Modelling10.1145/2428516.2428525(49-54)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2428516.2428525
Strickland TFelleisen M(2010)Contracts for first-class classesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1899661.186964245:12(97-112)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1899661.1869642
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Index Terms

jContractor: A Reflective Java Library to Support Design by Contract
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Object oriented languages

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

Reflection '99: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection

July 1999

270 pages

ISBN:3540662804

Editor:
Pierre Cointe

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 19 July 1999

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Strickland TDimoulas CTakikawa AFelleisen M(2013)Contracts for First-Class ClassesACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/251818935:3(1-58)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2518189
Francisco MCastro LBalaban MCabot JGogolla MWilke C(2012)Automatic generation of test models and properties from UML models with OCL constraintsProceedings of the 12th Workshop on OCL and Textual Modelling10.1145/2428516.2428525(49-54)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2428516.2428525
Strickland TFelleisen M(2010)Contracts for first-class classesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1899661.186964245:12(97-112)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1899661.1869642
Strickland TFelleisen MClinger W(2010)Contracts for first-class classesProceedings of the 6th symposium on Dynamic languages10.1145/1869631.1869642(97-112)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1869631.1869642
Strickland TFelleisen M(2009)Nested and dynamic contract boundariesProceedings of the 21st international conference on Implementation and application of functional languages10.5555/1929087.1929096(141-158)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1929087.1929096
Lusth JKraft NTacey J(2009)Language subsetting via reflection and overloadingProceedings of the 39th IEEE international conference on Frontiers in education conference10.5555/1733663.1733941(1187-1192)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1733663.1733941
Moiseev RHayashi SSaeki M(2009)Generating Assertion Code from OCLProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_52(650-664)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_52
Guha AMatthews JFindler RKrishnamurthi SCostanza PHirschfeld R(2007)Relationally-parametric polymorphic contractsProceedings of the 2007 symposium on Dynamic languages10.1145/1297081.1297089(29-40)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1297081.1297089
Froihofer LGlos GOsrael JGoeschka K(2007)Overview and Evaluation of Constraint Validation Approaches in JavaProceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2007.60(313-322)Online publication date: 24-May-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2007.60
Meron DMermet B(2006)A tool architecture to verify properties of multiagent system at runtimeProceedings of the 4th international conference on Programming multi-agent systems10.5555/1759324.1759340(201-216)Online publication date: 9-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1759324.1759340
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jContractor: Introducing Design-by-Contract to Java Using Reflective Bytecode Instrumentation