JavaCompExt: Extracting Architectural Elements from Java Source Code

Abstract

International audienceSoftware architecture erosion is a general problem in legacy software. To fight this trend, component models and languages are designed to try to make explicit, and automatically enforceable, the architectural decisions in terms of components, interfaces, and allowed communication channels between component interfaces. To help maintainers work on existing object-oriented systems, we explore the possibility of extracting architectural elements (components, communications, services, ...) from the source code. We designed a tool based on some heuristics for extracting component information from Java source code

Reverse Engineering Encapsulated Components from Object-Oriented Legacy Code

“…JAVACompExt [3] is a heuristic based approach that extracts Abstract Data Type (ADT) components. The purpose 1 Components based on architecture description languages 2 The term re-deposit-ability means ability to re-deposit the composed components after retrieval for future reuse.…”

“…Composition connectors in X-MAN are control structures that direct the route of execution. Sequencer (SEQ) composition connector provides sequencing of execution between two or more than two components and Selector (SEL) provides branching based on specific conditions 3 . Basic semantics of X-MAN component model are shown in Figure 2.…”

“…Almost all the current reverse engineering approaches that extract explicit components are based on ADLs 1 (e.g., [3]). ADLs define required and provided services as ports (composition mechanism of ADLs).…”

Effective Security Impact Analysis with Patterns for Software Enhancement

“…There are many ways to get requirements and designs from codes though reverse engineering. For example, we can make use case diagrams from code [15], class diagrams from code [16], and architectural elements from Java code [17]. However, because the code can tell us whether a function or a model element is related to a security issue, we cannot identify the security impacts only through reverse engineering.…”

Learning from optimization: A case study with Apache Ant

“…Architecture erosion is the process through which the system's architecture gradually degrades as the maintainers make changes that violate the design-time architectural intents [5]. Erosion leads to architecture mismatch [23], a situation where the current implementation of a software system significantly differs from its original design, as shown in its design-time architecture.…”