Preventing Bugs with Pluggable Type Checking
TS-3798

Are you tired of null pointer exceptions, unintended side effects, mistaken equality tests, and other runtime errors that appear during testing or in the field? A pluggable type system can guarantee the absence of these types of errors and many more. This session describes a set of pluggable type checkers that operate as annotation processors for javac. The type checkers are easy to use (for example, the syntax is much less verbose than generics) and have found many errors in real programs. The Java 7 programming language will contain syntactic support for type annotations, but meanwhile your code remains backward-compatible with all versions of the Java programming language.

The session also discusses and demonstrates the Checker Framework, which enables programmers to write an annotation processor that checks custom properties of your code and prevents even more bugs. The type checkers and the Checker Framework are publicly available at groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/jsr308/.

This presentation is intended for programmers who are familiar with the Java programming language and want to improve the quality of their code to prevent runtime exceptions.

You will learn

• About practical tools that detect and prevent bugs
• How you can download and use the tools today
• How to write custom checkers to prevent even more bugs

You will also see the Java 7 programming language's type annotations in action.