Collaborative Research: CI-P: NJR: A National Java Resource

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This planning project will plan an infrastructure called the National Java Resource (NJR), which will be a collection of (on the order of) 10,000 Java projects that build and run out of the box, and for which popular static and dynamic analysis tools succeed and have cached outputs. The tasks of writing build scripts and otherwise preparing Java projects and tools for the repository will be largely automated. A prototype was developed to serve the DARPA MUSE project, but that project is ending soon and does not have plans to establish the NJR. A large and diverse set of Java-based research projects will be able to use it, providing an experimental platform and benchmarks, and eliminating barriers to performing the research. It is expected that the project will open up new areas of research that have been impeded by the lack of a high-quality corpus of such programs that can be easily compiled, run, and analyzed. The NJR repository has the potential to push forward research on a wide range of Java-based tools, such as bug finders, code repair tools, code synthesizers, software evolution, software repository mining, along with other code analysis tools. The planning activity will involve running workshops at major programming languages conferences and possibly the major software engineering conference, with a goal to engage users and fully understand their requirements. The project will also continue experimenting with how to make downloading, compiling, and running projects less painful, i.e., more automatic, and to improve the success rate of how many projects are amenable to automatic builds, compilation and execution. There is potential for additional communities to benefit if the outreach can be extended to program comprehension, testing, and mining software repositories conferences.