Open Integrated Development and Analysis Environments
Michael Eichberg · Technischen Universität Darmstadt · 2008
Comprehensive tool support is essential to enable developers to cope with the complexity of modern software development pro jects. Software projects are getting larger and larger, are being developed using different languages, and make use of many third-party libraries as well as frameworks. Hence, tools are required: for software comprehension, for checking that libraries and frameworks are correctly used, and to ensure that the design does not degrade over time. Though numerous successful tools have already been developed for these tasks, several issues remain: the tools are usually highly specialized, their extensibility is limited, and an integration between the tools is lacking. Furthermore, IDE integration and in particular an integration with the incremental build process offered by modern IDEs is also often missing. Unfortunately, the direct integration of several code analysis tools with the incremental build process is not possible. When each tool processes the pro ject’s resources on its own and also maintains its own source model, the overall memory requirements and analysis time is prohibitive. To address these issues, this thesis proposes the concept of a Build Process Integrated Open Static Analysis Platform. The core functionality of such a platform is to coordinate the execution of static analyses that are encapsulated into modules with well-defined interfaces. These interfaces specify what the analyses require and provide in terms of the data they process. For a tool that is built upon such a platform it is sufficient to specify the data it requires. The platform can then determine the set of analyses and their execution order to satisfy the tool’s requirements. Modeling analyses as modular producer-consumer units facilitates the simultaneous integration of several tools into the incremental build process of modern IDEs. When compared to using several independent tools, the overall memory requirements are reduced, since the source model derived by the executed analyses is shared among all tools built upon the platform. Furthermore, the overall analysis time is also reduced since analyses are executed at most once, even if the derived information is required by more than one tool. The overall analysis time is further minimized by the parallel execution of those analyses that process different information. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by Magellan. Magellan is an open static analysis platform tightly integrated with the incremental build process of the Eclipse IDE. This integration turns Eclipse into an Integrated Development and Analysis Environment. The set of modules implementing the static analyses is freely extensible and the data model of the database is open. An open data model is crucial to support new analyses that need to store derived information for the use by subsequent analyses. Besides featuring a fully flexible analysis stack, Magellan also supports the embedding of query engines. Supporting the execution of queries is indispensable for enabling end-users to define application specific analyses. The ability to execute queries is also required to facilitate software comprehension tools. As a proof of concept an XQuery processor and a Prolog system are embedded into Magellan. Both engines are evaluated w.r.t. to using them for the execution of queries along with the incremental build process. The XQuery engine is additionally evaluated in the context of software comprehension tools as a means to enable the end-user to define new ways to navigate through code. The platform is validated by four tools built on top of it: a software exploration tool, a metrics tool, an optional type system, and a set of lightweight static analyses that check structural properties of source code.