A Tool Platform Using an XML Representation of Java Source Code

Poster

Visitor: Katsuhisa Maruyama, Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Co-Researcher: Shinichiro Yamamoto, Aich Prefectural University, Japan

Abstract: Recent IDEs have become more extensible tool platforms but do not concern themselves with how tools running on them collaborate with each other. They compel tool developers to use proprietary representations or the classical AST to build software tools managing source code. Although these representations contain sufficient information, they are neither portable nor extensible. We propose Sapid/XML, a tool platform that manages commonly used, fined-grained information about Java source code by using an XML representation. Our representation, called XSDML (eXtensible Software Document Markup Language), is suitable for developing tools which browse and manipulate actual code since the original code is both structured with tags and stored in textual elements of a converted XML document. Additionally, it exposes information resulting from global semantic analysis, which is never provided by the typical AST. Our proposed platform allows the developers to extend the representation for the purpose of sharing or exchanging various kinds of information about source code, and also enables them to build new tools by using existing XML utilities, such as DOM, SAX, XSLT, and JDOM. We have developed two practical tools, a refactoring browser (Jrbx) and a source code browser.

Biography: Katsuhisa Maruyama is an Associate Professor from Ritsumeikan University in Japan. He received a ph.D in informatics from Waseda University. He has worked for NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) and NTT Communications Corporation before he joined Ritsumeikan University. His research interests involve software evolution and modification using software components and program analysis techniques.