Language-specific make technology for the Java programming language

• Authors: Mikhail Dmitriev
• Venue: OOPSLA '02 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
• Year: 2002

Keeping the code of a Java application consistent (code is consistent if all of the project classes can be recompiled together without errors) prevents late linking errors, and thus may significantly improve development turnaround time. In this paper we describe a make technology for the Java programming language, that is based on smart dependency checking, guarantees consistency of the project code, and at the same time reduces the number of source code recompilations to the minimum. After project code consistency is initially assured by complete recompilation, the information extracted from the binary classes is stored in a so-called project database. Whenever the source code for some class C is changed, its recompiled binary is compared to the old version of C preserved in the project database. As a result, we find a minimum subset of classes that depend on C and may be affected by the particular change made to it. These are recompiled in turn, and absence of compilation errors at this phase guarantees the consistency of the new project code. To determine which dependent classes to recompile, we categorize all source incompatible changes, and for each category establish a criterion for finding the smallest possible subset of dependent classes.