Type Checking for Reliable APIs

Conference paper (2017)

Authors

M. Kechagia Athens University of Economics and Business
D. Spinellis Athens University of Economics and Business
Affiliation
External organisation
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Published Date

30-06-2017

Language

English

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Affiliation

External organisation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to configure at compiletime the checking associated with Application Programming Interfaces' methods that can receive possibly malformed values (e.g. erroneous user inputs and problematic retrieved recordsfrom databases) and thus cause application execution failures. To achieve this, we design a type system for implementing apluggable checker on the Java's compiler and find at compile timeinsufficient checking bugs that can lead to application crashesdue to malformed inputs. Our goal is to wrap methods whenthey receive external inputs so that the former generate checkedinstead of unchecked exceptions. We believe that our approachcan improve Java developers' productivity, by using exceptionhandling only when it is required, and ensure client applications'stability. We want to evaluate our checker by using it to verifythe source code of Java projects from the Apache ecosystem. Also, we want to analyze stack traces to validate the identifiedfailures by our checker.