License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.1
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-107932
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2019/10793/
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Meier, Shawn ; Mover, Sergio ; Chang, Bor-Yuh Evan

Lifestate: Event-Driven Protocols and Callback Control Flow

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LIPIcs-ECOOP-2019-1.pdf (0.9 MB)

Abstract

Developing interactive applications (apps) against event-driven software frameworks such as Android is notoriously difficult. To create apps that behave as expected, developers must follow complex and often implicit asynchronous programming protocols. Such protocols intertwine the proper registering of callbacks to receive control from the framework with appropriate application-programming interface (API) calls that in turn affect the set of possible future callbacks. An app violates the protocol when, for example, it calls a particular API method in a state of the framework where such a call is invalid. What makes automated reasoning hard in this domain is largely what makes programming apps against such frameworks hard: the specification of the protocol is unclear, and the control flow is complex, asynchronous, and higher-order. In this paper, we tackle the problem of specifying and modeling event-driven application-programming protocols. In particular, we formalize a core meta-model that captures the dialogue between event-driven frameworks and application callbacks. Based on this meta-model, we define a language called lifestate that permits precise and formal descriptions of application-programming protocols and the callback control flow imposed by the event-driven framework. Lifestate unifies modeling what app callbacks can expect of the framework with specifying rules the app must respect when calling into the framework. In this way, we effectively combine lifecycle constraints and typestate rules. To evaluate the effectiveness of lifestate modeling, we provide a dynamic verification algorithm that takes as input a trace of execution of an app and a lifestate protocol specification to either produce a trace witnessing a protocol violation or a proof that no such trace is realizable.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{meier_et_al:LIPIcs:2019:10793,
  author =	{Shawn Meier and Sergio Mover and Bor-Yuh Evan Chang},
  title =	{{Lifestate: Event-Driven Protocols and Callback Control Flow}},
  booktitle =	{33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019)},
  pages =	{1:1--1:29},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-111-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{134},
  editor =	{Alastair F. Donaldson},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10793},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-107932},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.1},
  annote =	{Keywords: event-driven systems, application-programming protocols, application framework interfaces, callbacks, sound framework modeling, predictive dynamic ve}
}

Keywords: event-driven systems, application-programming protocols, application framework interfaces, callbacks, sound framework modeling, predictive dynamic ve
Collection: 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019)
Issue Date: 2019
Date of publication: 10.07.2019
Supplementary Material: ECOOP 2019 Artifact Evaluation approved artifact available at https://dx.doi.org/10.4230/DARTS.5.2.13

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