Eric Bodden

-2°C

On this page I provide some tools for download, which I developed during my past research.

RacerAJ

RacerAJ is an AspectJ based implementation of the Racer algorithm, a variant of Eraser. It allows you to detect data races in Java and AspectJ programs at runtime. The implementation of RacerAJ is based on three novel pointcuts that we implemented as an extension to the AspectBench Compiler.

Soot

I provide an introduction to Soot 2.2.5 here.

J-LO, the Java Logical Observer

J-LO is a tool for runtime-checking temporal assertions, which I developed for my Diploma thesis at RWTH Aachen University. You can find all information about it, including downloads, here.

Generate clone() plugin for Eclipse

Ever had to deal with cloning of object structures in Java? As my study showed, there is actually a lot that can go wrong with this and many people do get it wrong all the time. Hence, why not have a plugin for Eclipse that helps you generate clone() methods semi-automatically? I have written exactly such a plugin. It first of all detects four different code smells with respect to cloning and in addition offers you to correct those smells by generating a correct implementation of clone().

Download the plugin here. My presentation slides show how it can be used.

I am currently discussion integration of this plugin into the main Eclipse build stream. If you support this idea, you might want to vote for it here and here.

Static optimizations for tracematches

As I describe on my research page, I have developed several static analyses to speed up runtime verification using tracematches, and sometimes even match tracematches against a program completely at compile time. All those analyses are available in the AspectBench Compiler and for download at the compiler’s website.

AspectJ library for fault tolerance

As a course project at McGill, I developed a little library for fault tolerance, written in AspectJ 5. It contains two components:

1. Support for automatic N-Version programming.
2. A full implementation of a recovery cache.

The fundamental concepts involved are explained in Joerg Kienzle’s lecture slides. N-Version programming basically allows you to implement several different versions of an algorithm. With the library, those versions are then automatically run in parallel, synchronized and a voter decides the overall outcome of the concurrent computation (usually voting based on a majority vote). Here is some example code:

VersionGroup1 version1 = new Version1();
VersionGroup1 version2 = new Version2();
VersionGroup1 version3 = new Version3();
Voter v = new ExceptionalMajorityVoter();
VersionGroup group =
    new VersionGroup("group1",v,1,TimeUnit.SECONDS,version1,version2,version3);
VersionGroupRegistry.v().registerVersionGroup(group);
System.err.println(version1.compute(1));

This snippet of code associates three versions with the same group. In the last line, where we kick off the computation, an around-advice will automatically start all three versions and then return the voted result instead of the original one.

The recovery block on the other hand allows you to do checkpointing on the fly: Just call the checkpoint method, do some state changes and then, for instance in case of an exception, call restore(). All the previous heap state will be restored for you.

The library can be downloaded in the form of two Eclipse projects here:

1. NVersion
2. RecoveryCache

Example clients are included. The code is made available under the BSD license.

Aspect-oriented approaches targeting the .NET Framework

There exists a survey Aspect-oriented approaches targeting the .NET Framework of  which I prepared for the the article bit-Fabrik: Zweigstelle, Hauptstelle, Dienstleister: Aspektorientierte Programmierung mit .NET that I co-authored with Torsten Weber.