Especificação e monitoramento dinâmico da política de tratamento de exceções

Abstract

The exception handling policy of a system comprises the set of design rules that specify its exception handling behavior how exceptions should be handled and thrown. Such policy is usually undocumented and implicitly defined by the system architect. For that reason, the developers may think that by just sprinkling the with catch-blocks in all places where exceptions may potentially be released they are adequately dealing with the exceptional conditions of a system. This lack of information may turn the exception handling into a generalized "goto"mechanism making the program more complex and less reliable. This work proposes a domain - specific language called ECL (Exception Contract Language) to specify the exception handling policy and a runtime monitoring tool which dynamically checks thise policy. This tool is called DAEH (Dynamic Analysis Of Exception Handling). It is implemented in the form of an aspect library, which can added to any Java system without the need to change the application source code. We applied this approach to two large-scale WEB systems and to the a set of versions to the well-known JUnit framework and a mobile application. The results indicate that this approach can be used to express and automatically check the exception handling policy of a system, and consequently support the development of more robust Java systems and more robust.