Automated Translation of Java Source Code to Eiffel

Abstract

Abstract. Reusability is an important software engineering concept actively advocated for the last forty years. While reusability has been addressed for systems implemented using the same programming language, it does not usually handle interoperability with different programming languages. This paper presents a solution for the reuse of Java code within Eiffel programs based on a source-to-source translation from Java to Eiffel. The paper focuses on the critical aspects of the translation and illustrates them by formal means. The translation is implemented in the freely available tool J2Eif; it provides Eiffel replacements for the components of the Java runtime environment, including Java Native Interface services and reflection mechanisms. Our experiments demonstrate the practical usability of the translation scheme and its implementation, and record the performance slow-down compared to custom-made Eiffel applications: automatic translations of java.util data structures, java.io services, and SWT applications can be re-used as Eiffel programs, with the same functionalities as their original Java implementations.

EvoSpex: An Evolutionary Algorithm for Learning Postconditions

“…Since our tool is for Java, and these implementations are in Eiffel, we had to manually translate the whole classes into Java, for analysis with our tool (this also prevented us from considering more sophisticated case studies in this evaluation). While the translation was manual, we made an effort in making it systematic, preserving the structure of the original code, and taking into account the semantics of references (e.g., expanded types in Eiffel), array indexing in Eiffel vs. Java, etc., using as a guideline the J2Eif work [36]. Eiffel also differs from Java in other important aspects that did not affect the translation (e.g., inheritance, visibility of features, etc.).…”

The Design and Evaluation of an Interoperable Translation System for Object-Oriented Software Reuse.

“…Most of these report challenges in performing a completely automated conversion of the entire source language. For example, Trudel et al created a comprehensive Java to Eiffel translator that successfully ported some large test cases [TOFN11]. However, they were unable to translate aspects of Java that are unsupported in Eiffel, such as dynamic loading and weak references.…”

C to O-O Translation: Beyond the Easy Stuff

“…In previous work, we developed J2Eif, an automatic source-to-source translator from Java to Eiffel [43]; translating between two object-oriented languages does not Eiffel yes yes + yes yes yes yes pose some of the formidable problems of bridging wildly different abstraction levels, which C2Eif had to deal with. TXL [2] is an expressive programming language designed to support source code analysis and transformation.…”