research-article

Silverchain: a fluent API generator

Authors:

Tomoki Nakamaru,

Kazuhiro Ichikawa,

Tetsuro Yamazaki,

Shigeru ChibaAuthors Info & Claims

GPCE 2017: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences

Pages 199 - 211

https://doi.org/10.1145/3136040.3136041

Published: 23 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a tool named Silverchain, which generates class definitions for a fluent API from the grammar of the API. A fluent API is an API that is used by method chaining and its grammar is a BNF-like set of rules that defines method chains accepted in type checking. Fluent APIs generated by Silverchain provide two styles of APIs: One is for building a chain by concatenating all method calls in series. The other is for building a chain from partial chains by passing child chains to method calls in the parent chain as their arguments. To generate such a fluent API, Silverchain first translates given grammar into a set of deterministic pushdown automata without ϵ-transitions, then encodes these automata into class definitions. Each constructed automata corresponds to a nonterminal in given grammar and recognizes symbol sequences produced from its corresponding nonterminal.

References

[1]

Rajeev Alur and Parthasarathy Madhusudan. 2004. Visibly Pushdown Languages. In Proceedings of the Thirty-sixth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC ’04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 202–211.

Digital Library

[2]

Eric Bodden. 2010. Efficient Hybrid Typestate Analysis by Determining Continuation-equivalent States. In Proceedings of the 32Nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1 (ICSE ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5–14.

Digital Library

[3]

Eric Bodden. 2014. TS4J: A Fluent Interface for Defining and Computing Typestate Analyses. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on the State of the Art in Java Program Analysis (SOAP ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1–6.

Digital Library

[4]

Janusz Brzozowski. 1962. Canonical Regular Expressions and Minimal State Graphs for Definite Events. (1962), 529–561.

[5]

John Cocke. 1969. Programming Languages and Their Compilers: Preliminary Notes. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

[6]

Joel Costigliola. 2014. AssertJ / Fluent assertions for java. (December 2014). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from http://joel-costigliola.github. io/assertj/

[7]

Bruno Courcelle. 1977. On Jump-Deterministic Pushdown Automata. Mathematical systems theory 11, 1 (Dec 1977), 87–109.

[8]

Joseph Darcy. 2016. JDK 9 Language, Tooling, and Library Features. (September 2016). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from https: //cdn.app.compendium.com/uploads/user/e7c690e8-6ff9-102a-ac6d -e4aebca50425/f4a5b21d-66fa-4885-92bf-c4e81c06d916/File/e1950f 4e52d2b112757b70cf28caa117/j1_2016_jdk9_lang_tools_libs.pdf

[9]

Sebastian Erdweg, Tillmann Rendel, Christian Kästner, and Klaus Ostermann. 2011. SugarJ: Library-based Syntactic Language Extensibility. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications (OOPSLA ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 391–406.

Digital Library

[10]

Martin Fowler. 2005. FluentInterface. (December 2005). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FluentI nterface.html

[11]

Yossi Gil and Tomer Levy. 2016. Formal Language Recognition with the Java Type Checker. In 30th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2016), Shriram Krishnamurthi and Benjamin S. Lerner (Eds.), Vol. 56. Schloss Dagstuhl–Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, Dagstuhl, Germany, 10:1–10:27.

[12]

Data Geekery GmbH. 2017. jOOQ: The easiest way to write SQL in Java. (September 2017). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from https: //www.jooq.org/

[13]

Sheila Greibach. 1965. A New Normal-Form Theorem for ContextFree Phrase Structure Grammars. J. ACM 12, 1 (Jan. 1965), 42–52.

Digital Library

[14]

Radu Grigore. 2017. Java Generics Are Turing Complete. In Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2017). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 73–85.

Digital Library

[15]

Hamcrest. 2012. Hamcrest. (August 2012). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from http://hamcrest.org/

[16]

Michael Harrison and Ivan Havel. 1972. Real-Time Strict Deterministic Languages. SIAM J. Comput. 1, 4 (1972), 333–349.

[17]

Paul Hudak. 1996. Building Domain-specific Embedded Languages. ACM Comput. Surv. 28, 4es, Article 196 (Dec. 1996).

Digital Library

[18]

Kazuhiro Ichikawa. 2016. phenan/scalalr: ScaLALR : LALR parser generator for embedded DSLs in Scala. (December 2016). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from https://github.com/phenan/scalalr

[19]

Kazuhiro Ichikawa and Shigeru Chiba. 2017. User-Defined Operators Including Name Binding for New Language Constructs. The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming 1, 2, Article 15 (2017).

[20]

Tadao Kasami. 1965. An Efficient Recognition and Syntax-Analysis Algorithm for Context-Free Languages. Technical Report. DTIC Document.

[21]

Ansgar Konermann. 2010. Emulating "self types" using Java Generics to simplify fluent API implementation. (November 2010). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from http://web.archive.org/web/20130721224442/http: /passion.forco.de/content/emulating-self-types-using-java-generics -simplify-fluent-api-implementation

[22]

Tomer Levy. 2017. A Fluent API for Automatic Generation of Fluent APIs in Java. Ph.D. Dissertation. Israel Institute of Technology.

[23]

Vicente Romero and Maurizio Cimadamore. 2016. JEP 215: Tiered Attribution for javac. (July 2016). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/215

[24]

Daniel Rosenkrantz and Richard Stearns. 1969. Properties of Deterministic Top Down Grammars. In Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC ’69). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 165–180.

Digital Library

[25]

Robert Strom and Shaula Yemini. 1986. Typestate: A programming language concept for enhancing software reliability. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-12, 1 (Jan 1986), 157–171.

Digital Library

[26]

Ken Thompson. 1968. Programming Techniques: Regular Expression Search Algorithm. Commun. ACM 11, 6 (June 1968), 419–422.

Digital Library

[27]

Peter Verhas. 2014. verhas/fluflu: Fluent Api Creator. (July 2014). Retrieved September 4, 2017 from https://github.com/verhas/fluflu

[28]

Hao Xu. 2010. EriLex: An Embedded Domain Specific Language Generator. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg. 192–212 pages.

[29]

Daniel Younger. 1967. Recognition and parsing of context-free languages in time n3. Information and Control 10, 2 (1967), 189 – 208.

Cited By

Roth OJust RFraser G(2023)Type AutomataProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3605237(1537-1540)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597926.3605237
Vuković MVujović VŠtaka ZMilinković S(2023)Domain-Specific Language for Modeling Fluent API2023 15th International Conference on Electronics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)10.1109/ECAI58194.2023.10194083(1-6)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ECAI58194.2023.10194083
Yamazaki TNakamaru TChiba SFischer BBurgueño LCazzola W(2022)Yet Another Generating Method of Fluent Interfaces Supporting Flat- and Sub-chaining StylesProceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3567512.3567533(249-259)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567512.3567533
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Silverchain: a fluent API generator
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Source code generation
    2. Context specific languages
      1. Domain specific languages

Recommendations

Fluent APIs in Functional Languages

Fluent API is an object-oriented pattern for elegant APIs and embedded DSLs. A smart fluent API can enforce the API protocol or DSL syntax at compile time. Since fluent API implementations typically rely on overloading function names, they are hard to ...
Study of the subtyping machine of nominal subtyping with variance

This is a study of the computing power of the subtyping machine behind Kennedy and Pierce's nominal subtyping with variance. We depict the lattice of fragments of Kennedy and Pierce's type system and characterize their computing power in terms of regular,...
Generating a fluent API with syntax checking from an LR grammar

This paper proposes a fluent API generator for Scala, Haskell, and C++. It receives a grammar definition and generates a code skeleton of the library in the host programming language. The generated library is accessed through a chain of method calls; ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

GPCE 2017: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences

October 2017

258 pages

ISBN:9781450355247

DOI:10.1145/3136040

General Chair:
Matthew Flatt
University of Utah, USA
,
Program Chair:
Sebastian Erdweg
TU Delft, Netherlands

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 52, Issue 12
GPCE '17
December 2017
258 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/3170492
Editor:
Matthew Fluet
Rodchester Institude of Technology
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

In-Cooperation

SIGAda: ACM Special Interest Group on Ada Programming Language

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '17

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '17: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 23 - 24, 2017

BC, Vancouver, Canada

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 56 of 180 submissions, 31%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

15
Total Citations
View Citations
257
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)23
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 06 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Roth OJust RFraser G(2023)Type AutomataProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3605237(1537-1540)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597926.3605237
Vuković MVujović VŠtaka ZMilinković S(2023)Domain-Specific Language for Modeling Fluent API2023 15th International Conference on Electronics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)10.1109/ECAI58194.2023.10194083(1-6)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ECAI58194.2023.10194083
Yamazaki TNakamaru TChiba SFischer BBurgueño LCazzola W(2022)Yet Another Generating Method of Fluent Interfaces Supporting Flat- and Sub-chaining StylesProceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3567512.3567533(249-259)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567512.3567533
Ren XYin HChen TWang HHung NHuang ZZhang X(2020)CRSALACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/339459238:4(1-40)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3394592
Nakamaru TMatsunaga TYamazaki TAkiyama SChiba S(2020)An Empirical Study of Method Chaining in JavaProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3379597.3387441(93-102)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3379597.3387441
Raad AWickerson JVafeiadis V(2019)Weak persistency semantics from the ground up: formalising the persistency semantics of ARMv8 and transactional modelsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605613:OOPSLA(1-27)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360561
Yamazaki TNakamaru TIchikawa KChiba S(2019)Generating a fluent API with syntax checking from an LR grammarProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33605603:OOPSLA(1-24)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360560
Allender EHirahara S(2019)New Insights on the (Non-)Hardness of Circuit Minimization and Related ProblemsACM Transactions on Computation Theory10.1145/334961611:4(1-27)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3349616
Scheder D(2019)PPSZ for k ≥ 5: More Is BetterACM Transactions on Computation Theory10.1145/334961311:4(1-22)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3349613
Blais ECanonne CEden TLevi ARon D(2019)Tolerant Junta Testing and the Connection to Submodular Optimization and Function IsomorphismACM Transactions on Computation Theory10.1145/333778911:4(1-33)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3337789
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents