Runtime Data Analysis for Java Programs

Program analysis plays a key role in many areas of software development, such as performance tuning, testing, debugging, and maintenance. Program analysis can be carried out statically or dynamically, and these two approaches are generally seen as being complementary to each other. In this paper, we will focus on runtime data analysis for object oriented systems in general and the Java 2 platform in particular. More specifically, we are investigating various runtime approaches to monitor the access and modification of variables in a Java program in order to keep track of the their usage history, being of particular interest for dynamic data flow analysis. Our results indicate that the Java 2 platform does not provide sufficient tools to enable comprehensive runtime data analysis in this context, especially when the complete source code of an application under investigation is unavailable.