Section: New Software and Platforms

Spoon

Participants : Martin Monperrus [correspondant] , Gérard Paligot, Nicolas Petitprez.

In 2014, Spoon has been at the core of an industrial transfer action that aims at creating a spin-off company. The project is managed by Nicolas Petitprez and Martin Monperrus. The project has been accepted (so-called qualification) in 2014 by the Inria investment fund IT-Translation. The project in supported by Direction Transfert & Innovation which will fund in 2015 the 1-year engineer contract of Nicolas Petitprez for maturing the project. As an open source project Spoon has attracted new contributors in 2014. The Spoon development team is now composed of 8 active members, including 4 that are not at all related to Inria. Second, Spoon now supports analyzing and transforming Java 7 code, which is the now the dominant version of Java. Third, Spoon is the technical foundation of five important papers published in 2014. To sum up, year 2014 was a major year for warming up the Spoon project. Thanks to the support of Inria through the ADT, year 2015 is expected to be as vibrant and rich.

Spoon is a library for analyzing and transforming Java source code [76] [109] . Spoon provides a core API and associated tools for static analysis and generative programming within the Java 5+ environment. Spoon must be seen as a basis to ensure Software Quality through code validation and generation. It can be used in the software development process during the validation phase, as well as for engineering and re-engineering software. The first key point of Spoon is to provide a well-typed and comprehensive AST API which is designed to facilitate analysis and transformation work for programmers. Scanners and processors allow the programmer to implement various program traversal strategies on the Java program. Also, the program representation is built with a well-known and well-tested open source Java compiler: the Eclipse JDT compiler, which ensures the support of the latest Java features. The second key point of Spoon is to provide a pure Java API to specify program transformations using a well-typed generative programming technique (called Spoon Templates). By using well-typed templates, Spoon makes programming of transformations easier and safer for the end-user programmers.

Spoon is at the core of the Inria ADT Spoon3R project (see Section  8.1 ).

Web site: http://spoon.gforge.inria.fr . Registered with the APP (Agence pour la Protection des Programmes) under reference IDDN.FR.001.070037.000.S.P.2007.000.10600. License: CeCILL-C.