SBIR Phase I: Dependence Graphs for Internet Technologies

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from GrammaTech aims to conduct research that will address fundamental problems facing developers of the software systems that comprise the Internet. Problems with Internet systems such as software faults, security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies can lead to a lack of confidence in the medium and hinder its further development. The tools used to construct these systems have so far mostly failed to help mitigate these problems because they were generally designed for more traditionally-constructed systems-- those that are mostly static and mostly single-threaded. In contrast, Internet systems are typically highly dynamic and often involve concurrency. A new breed of tools based on techniques that use static-semantic analysis of programs has recently emerged for static and sequential systems. The research objective of this proposal is to extend and apply these techniques to the analysis of highly-dynamic concurrent systems. The key technical challenges are to devise representations and methods that make these enhanced analyses accurate and tractable and to invent mechanisms for querying and organizing the results of the analyses. The target will be the Java programming language. The potential applications of this research include tools for program understanding, restructuring, parallelization, debugging, and testing. The results of this research have commercial application in Interactive Development Environments (IDEs) for software construction, and in tools for all other phases of the software development process.