Towards an AST-Based Approach to Reverse Engineering

Author

Wang, Xin ; Yuan, Xiaojie

Author_Institution

Coll. of Inf. Tech. Sci., Nankai Univ., Tianjin

fYear

2006

fDate

38838

Firstpage

422

Lastpage

425

Abstract

Today, it is recognized that reverse-engineering activities play an important role in round-trip development and software maintenance. However, the precision of most existing reverse-engineering tools cannot meet the requirements of developers and maintainers, thus hampering understanding of software implementation. This paper presents an approach for recovering the UML class diagram from the Java source code, which traverses abstract syntax trees (AST) with the visitor pattern to build the corresponding UML model elements. The source code is completely and systematically analyzed by this approach. As a result, the precision of the generated design model will be substantially promoted

Keywords

Java; Unified Modeling Language; abstract data types; computer aided software engineering; reverse engineering; software maintenance; software tools; tree data structures; AST-based approach; Java source code; UML class diagram; abstract syntax trees; design model; reverse engineering; round-trip development; software implementation; software maintenance; visitor pattern; Computer aided software engineering; Design engineering; Educational institutions; Java; Reverse engineering; Software design; Software maintenance; Software tools; Tree data structures; Unified modeling language; AST; Reverse engineering; UML model;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2006. CCECE '06. Canadian Conference on

Conference_Location

Ottawa, Ont.

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0038-4

Electronic_ISBN

1-4244-0038-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CCECE.2006.277552

Filename

4054609