Java reflection API: revealing the dark side of the mirror

Pontes, Felipe; Gheyi, Rohit; Souto, Sabrina; Garcia, Alessandro; Ribeiro, Márcio

doi:10.1145/3338906.3338946

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Bugs related to underdetermined specifications in the reflection API are discussed in Pontes et al [10]. These are bugs in JDK implementations, not applications or libraries.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As explained in Section 3, these categories were adopted from Landman et al [8] and Sui et al [11]. The raw results are available in our replication package 10 .…”

Section: Further Investigation Of Common Causes Of These Bugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, no studies on bugs related to the use of these features in Java application code have been conducted. There was a recent study on bugs involving the use of dynamic features in Python [1].and some studies on reflection specific bugs in JVM code [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Study of Single Statement Bugs Involving Dynamic Language Features

Sui,

Rasheed,

Tahir

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Dynamic language features are widely available in programming languages to implement functionality that can adapt to multiple usage contexts, enabling reuse. Functionality such as data binding, object-relational mapping and user interface builders can be heavily dependent on these features. However, their use has risks and downsides as they affect the soundness of static analyses and techniques that rely on such analyses (such as bug detection and automated program repair). They can also make software more error-prone due to potential difficulties in understanding reflective code, loss of compile-time safety and incorrect API usage. In this paper, we set out to quantify some of the effects of using dynamic language features in Java programs -that is, the error-proneness of using those features with respect to a particular type of bug known as single statement bugs. By mining 2,024 GitHub projects, we found 139 single statement bug instances (falling under 10 different bug patterns), with the highest number of bugs belonging to three specific patterns: Wrong Function Name, Same Function More Args and Change Identifier Used. These results can help practitioners to quantify the risk of using dynamic techniques over alternatives (such as code generation). We hope this classification raises attention on choosing dynamic APIs that are likely to be error-prone, and provides developers a better understanding when designing bug detection tools for such feature.

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“…Bugs related to underdetermined specifications in the reflection API are discussed in Pontes et al [10]. These are bugs in JDK implementations, not applications or libraries.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As explained in Section 3, these categories were adopted from Landman et al [8] and Sui et al [11]. The raw results are available in our replication package 10 .…”

Section: Further Investigation Of Common Causes Of These Bugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Study of Single Statement Bugs Involving Dynamic Language Features

Sui,

Rasheed,

Tahir

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…At each cycle of our study, we used and adapted techniques aiming at prioritizing the user-API interaction in the API design for empowering its capacity of conversation. We believe that these techniques can be applied in other contexts, including for redesigning popular APIs from other domains whose conversation is problematic, such as Java Reflection (42) and APIs for refactoring (38).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When designer and user do not have the same understanding of a particular operation, an API with low communicability will not be able to pass its design rationale to the user. As consequence, it is very common reports of bugs coming from poor communicability in many popular APIs, such as Java Reflection (42) and automated refactoring APIs (38). For instance, let us consider the following interface offered by the Calendar API of the Java programming language: At stackoverflow.com, one of the most popular discussion forums for programmers, it is not hard to find postings with wrong explanations about the operation and behavior of the API above.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting Conversational Apis: A Conceptual Framework and a Method for Api Design

BASTOS¹

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To my advisor Professor Alessandro Garcia for the stimulus and partnership for this work. Thank you for believing in my work and for accepting the difficult mission of concluding a doctoral work that was already underway. To my first teacher counselor Clarisse de Souza and to my co-coordinator Luiz Afonso for all the help and guidance in the initial part of the Doctorate. By chance of fate we ended up not concluding the doctorate together, but your help was fundamental for my success. Thanks also to Professor Renato Cerqueira for the opportunity to carry out part of the research in the IBM Research Brazil laboratory. To all friends and research partners of OPUS and SERG groups. Thank you for all your support throughout my Doctorate. Counting on such well aligned and tuned groups helped a lot on the path to individual success. Thank you very much to all of you who in various ways contributed to my work. In particular, my thanks to Daniel Tenorio and Rafael Maiani who participated in an active way dedicating much time to my Doctoral research. Thank you very much for your valuable comments, suggestions and reviews. To my mother, Miriam, and to my wife Erica, without whom I would not have achieved success in this thesis. Thank you for all your support throughout this journey. To my in-laws, Alcemir and Dione for their support and affection over the past few years. To my brother Ernesto and his family. To my grandmother Zica and my aunts Marlene and Neuza. To all my friends and family who have supported me in this journey in various ways, thank you very much.

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