Control Patterns Analysis on Java Program Corpora

Abstract

Java programming, based on Object-Oriented (OO) paradigm, has played a major role in program design and implementation due to the fact that it is more extensible, maintainable, and reusable in the software system construction. Experiences of using Java programming have indicated that there exist disadvantages with respect to its execution inefficiency and complicated runtime behaviors. Program analysis is essential for performance measurement and improvement. Current static and dynamic analysis using OO programming cannot characterize runtime behavior well and are also hard to quantify the measured results. In this paper, research work was performed to analyze several Java program metrics and method invocation sequence. The results not only provide us a better understanding of the runtime behavior but also present more information for different application domains. Code-patterns are statically recurring structure specifically related to a programming language. It can be used in parallel to help designing software systems for solving particular problems. In opposition to code-patterns’ role in assisting compilation, control-patterns are dynamically recurring structures invoked during program execution time. It can be used to understand the run-time behaviors of OO-programs for the underlying architecture such as Java-VM. Control pattern describes the model of control transfer among objects in OO program execution. In this research, several control patterns are proposed and discussed. Particularly, we have analyzed and collected several control patterns over several Java program corpora. The experimental results show that control pattern does exist and provide quantitative analysis. Simple pattern, compound pattern and complex pattern have different ratio respectively, according to a variety of different source programs. Control patterns collected can be used to provide guidelines for Java programmers to write more effective Java program.