SCT Student Projects - Thomas Hächler

The goal of this master project was to apply the Universe type system to a real-world, industrial application and investigate its usability.

Abstract: The Chair of Programming Methodology has developed the Universe type system to control aliasing in object-oriented programming languages. The goal of this masters thesis is to get realistic experience in applying this type system to an industrial application.

The analyzed application is presented in chapter 1. In chapter 2 we give a short introduction to the Universe type system. In addition to the application, some Java API has been annotated with universe types. Some examples and encountered problems are presented in chapter 3. To enable static fields and application wide resources, a global universe has been used as an extension of the Universe type system.

The results of this case study are structured in three parts: (1) In chapter 4 we present how the Universe type system has been applied to the application and what parts had to be refactored. (2) Problems that have been encountered and workarounds that have been used while annotating the application are documented in chapter 5. (3) In chapter 6 we present a few approaches to extend the Universe type system. The focus of these extensions is on usage in real world applications.

The goal of this semester project was to investigate how static fields should be handled in the Universe type system.