Eric Bodden

2°C

Today we released version 2.2.5 of Soot, our program analysis and transformation framework for Java. Release 2.2.5 contains some exciting new features, for example:

• Manu Sridharan’s demand-driven refinement-based context-sensitive points-to analysis, based on Spark
• a new Thread-local objects analysis, which Halpert et al. used for automatic lock allocation
• an improved version of our nullness analysis, due to Julian Tibble, and
• Instance Keys, static representatives of runtime objects.

Furthermore there have been several improvements to the Soot Eclipse plugin to enhance its ease of use.

More information and installation instructions here.

I just uploaded a somewhat older project report that I wrote about two years ago. The report describes a denial-of-service attack on the pre-Java6 bytecode verifier. People were asking for benchmarks on type inference – I think this is a good one. You can even try out the attack yourself. I have a demo online! See here.

By Thursday, there had already 316cm of snow come down over Montreal, which is not much below the all time record of 383 centimetres set in 1971. Today we expect another 25 to 50 cm. The view out of the window is just unbelievable (as my pants are unbelievably wet ). The look on the radar, too…

You are a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and have at lest 12 months before defending your dissertation? Does your thesis topic has anything at all to do with the following topic around object-orientation?

• Analysis, design methods and design patterns
• Concurrent, real-time or parallel systems
• Databases, persistence and transactions
• Distributed and mobile systems
• Frameworks, product lines and software architectures
• Language design and implementation
• Testing and metrics
• Programming environments and tools
• Theoretical foundations, type systems, formal methods
• Versioning, compatibility, software evolution
• Aspects, Components, Modularity, Reflection
• Collaboration, Workflow

Then you might consider submitting to the ECOOP 2008 Doctoral Symposium and PhD Student Workshop. It’s going to be in July at the beautiful Mediterranean island Cyprus! Note that those are two distinct, but joint events:

• the Doctoral Symposium, and
• the PhD Students’ workshop.

The former is meant to be for students that have already chosen their topic and have some idea about what they are doing, while the latter is addressed primarily to PhD students in the early stages of their PhD work. The goal is to allow participants to present their research ideas and obtain feedback from the rest of the workshop attendees.