Large software systems are typically composed of multiple layers, written in different languages and loosely coupled using a string-based interface. For example, in modern web-applications, a server written in Java communicates with a database back-end by passing in query strings. This widely prevalent approach is unsafe as the analyses developed for the individual layers are oblivious to the semantics of the dynamically constructed strings, making it impossible to statically reason about the correctness of the interaction. Further, even simple refactoring in such systems is daunting and error prone as the changes must also be applied to isolated string fragments scattered across the code base. The Deep Typechecking and Refactoring project investigates techniques for deep typechecking and refactoring for systems that combine Java code with a database back-end using the Java Persistence API. Deep typechecking ensures that the queries that are constructed dynamically are type safe and that the values returned from the queries are used safely by the program. Deep refactoring builds upon typechecking to allow programmers to safely and automatically propagate code refactorings through the query string fragments.
23rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, (OOPSLA 2008), ACM Press, 2008. pp. 37-52.