AJANA: A General Framework for Source-Code-Level Interprocedural Dataflow Analysis of AspectJ Software

Thanks to Aleksandra Seremina for providing a Romanian translation of this webpage.

Aspect-oriented software presents new challenges for the designers of static analyses. Our work aims to establish systematic foundations for dataflow analysis of AspectJ software. We propose a control- and data-flow program representation for AspectJ programs, as basis for subsequent interprocedural dataflow analyses. The representation is built at the source code level and captures the semantic intricacies of various pointcut designators, multiple applicable advices per joint point, dynamic advices, and general flow of data to, from, and between advices.

We also propose two dataflow analyses for AspectJ software: (1) a novel object effect analysis based on a flow- and context-sensitive must-alias analysis, and (2) a dependence analysis used for constructing the system dependence graph for slicing, refactoring, change impact analysis, etc. Both analyses are representative of a general category of dataflow analyses referred to as interprocedural distributed environment (IDE) problems. The two analyses are built on top of the proposed representation, and take into account the complex flow of control and data due to aspect-oriented features. We present a study of the proposed techniques on 37 program versions, using our AJANA analysis framework which is based on the abc AspectJ compiler. The results show that the representation can be built efficiently, that it is superior to an approach based on the woven bytecode, and that it enables analyses that are both faster and more precise. These findings strongly indicate that the proposed approach is a promising candidate for a foundation upon which various interprocedural analyses for AspectJ can be designed and built.

Download (Version 0.1, Released on March 8, 2009)

ajana-0.1.jar - source and binary

Publications

"AJANA: A General Framework for Source-Code-Level Interprocedural Dataflow Analysis of AspectJ Software"
by Guoqing Xu and Atanas Rountev
In Proc. International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Developement (AOSD'08), Brussels, Belgium, March, 2008. [PDF] [Talk]
"Regression Test Selection for AspectJ Software"
by Guoqing Xu and Atanas Rountev
In Proc. ACM SIGSOFT/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07), Minneapolis, MN, May, 2007. [PDF] [Talk]

AJANA Usage:

This section shows how to use AJANA framework.

prerequisite:
Before being able to use AJANA, you have to install the AspectBench compiler, which may in turn require the installation of the Soot program analysis framework.
Where to start:
The main entrance of the program is analysis.aspectj.Main, which takes five parameters:

arg[0] : the directory containing all benchmarks
arg[1]: the benchmark name
arg[2]: benchmark version -- this does not make sense now, though it used to work for test selection purpose
arg[3]: main class name
arg[4]: client analysis selector -- 0 for object effect analysis; 1 for slicing

Example: if the bytecode of a project dcm is located at directory

/home/gxu/projects/dcm/v1/

,the command line args that you need to give are the follows,

/home/gxu/projects/dcm dcm v1 certrevsim.Simulator 0

Usage details:
Currently, the tool does not support the use of per pointcut. You can simply build your analysis on top of the AJIG representation constructed by AJANA, by instantiating class

analysis.aspectj.ajig.AspectJInterModuleGraph

, and then invoking method

AspectJInterModuleGraph.build(SootMethod startMethod)

. The AJIG control flow and data flow representations are described precisely in our ICSE'07 and AOSD'08 papers, respectively.

Sample analysis:
You can look at my effect analysis

method build in analysis.aspectj.summary.SummaryAnalysis

for the example of manipulating AJIG.

Contributions

You can contribute to AJANA by sending bug reports, code patches, and suggestions. Please send your inquiries to xug at cse dot ohio-state dot edu.

People

Publications that make use of AJANA

"Unweaving the impact of aspect changes in AspectJ"
by Luca Cavallaro and Mattia Monga
In Proc. the 2009 workshop on Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages (FAOL), Charlottesville, VA, March, 2009.

Acknowledgement

We thank all of the developers of the abc AspectJ compiler, without whom the research would not happen.

Last updated: March 8, 2009