Packages

Definition Classes: root

Definition Classes: root

OPAL is a Scala-based framework for the static analysis, manipulation and creation of Java bytecode.

OPAL is a Scala-based framework for the static analysis, manipulation and creation of Java bytecode. OPAL is designed with performance, scalability and adaptability in mind.

Its main components are:

a library (Common) which provides generally useful data-structures and algorithms for static analyses.
a framework for implementing lattice based static analyses (Static Analysis Infrastructure)
a framework for parsing Java bytecode (Bytecode Infrastructure) that can be used to create arbitrary representations.
a library to create a one-to-one in-memory representation of Java bytecode (Bytecode Disassembler).
a library to create a representation of Java bytecode that facilitates writing simple static analyses (Bytecode Representation - org.opalj.br).
a scalable, easily customizable framework for the abstract interpretation of Java bytecode (Abstract Interpretation Framework - org.opalj.ai).
a library to extract dependencies between code elements and to facilitate checking architecture definitions.
a library for the lightweight manipulation and creation of Java bytecode (Bytecode Assembler).

General Design Decisions

Thread Safety

Unless explicitly noted, OPAL is thread safe. I.e., the classes defined by OPAL can be considered to be thread safe unless otherwise stated. (For example, it is possible to read and process class files concurrently without explicit synchronization on the client side.)

No `null` Values

Unless explicitly noted, OPAL does not null values I.e., fields that are accessible will never contain null values and methods will never return null. If a method accepts null as a value for a parameter or returns a null value it is always explicitly documented. In general, the behavior of methods that are passed null values is undefined unless explicitly documented.

No Typecasts for Collections

For efficiency reasons, OPAL sometimes uses mutable data-structures internally. After construction time, these data-structures are generally represented using their generic interfaces (e.g., scala.collection.{Set,Map}). However, a downcast (e.g., to add/remove elements) is always forbidden as it would effectively prevent thread-safety.

Assertions

OPAL makes heavy use of Scala's Assertion Facility to facilitate writing correct code. Hence, for production builds (after thorough testing(!)) it is highly recommend to build OPAL again using -Xdisable-assertions.