Reflective Constraint Management for Languages on Virtual Platforms.
Mark E. Royer, Suad Alagić, Dan Dillon · The Journal of Object Technology · 2007
Extending an object-oriented type system with assertions makes it possible for programs using reflection to rely on semantic information to ensure correct use of discovered types.Using extended reflective capabilities to access assertions in (dynamically) loaded class objects allows a variety of general and flexible verification techniques.The XVP (Extended Virtual Platform) implements these features by extending the Java Virtual Machine with the proposed functionalities.Its architecture and applications are described in the paper.One of the goals of the XVP is to provide a virtual platform that supports JML and the programming by contract methodology.