Automatic Refactoring Approach for Asynchronous Mechanisms with CompletableFuture

Abstract

To address the inherent limitations of Future in asynchronous programming frameworks, JDK 1.8 introduced the CompletableFuture class, which features approximately 50 different methods for composing and executing asynchronous computations and handling exceptions. This paper proposes an automatic refactoring method that integrates multiple static analysis techniques, including visitor pattern analysis, alias analysis, and executor inheritance structure analysis, to conduct precondition checks. Distinct from existing Future refactoring methods, this approach considers custom executor types, thereby extending its applicability. Using this method, the ReFuture automatic refactoring plugin was implemented within the Eclipse JDT framework. The method was evaluated in terms of the number of refactorings, refactoring time, and error introduction, alongside a side-by-side comparison with the existing method. The refactoring outcomes for nine large applications, including ActiveMQ, Hadoop, and Elasticsearch, show that ReFuture successfully refactored 639 out of 813 potential code structures, achieving a refactoring success rate of 64.70% without introducing errors. This tool effectively facilitates the refactoring to CompletableFuture and enhances refactoring efficiency compared to manual methods.

Keywords

• automatic refactoring
• Java
• CompletableFuture
• static analysis