Class Hierarchy Basics

The ClassHierarchy is the central collection of IClasses that define your analysis scope (the program being analyzed).

Class Loaders

Note that Java provides namespaces for classes called classloaders. WALA's structures mimic the Java class hierarchy namespaces: note that each IClass belongs to an IClassLoader, while each TypeReference specifies a ClassLoaderReference.

Unless you are doing something exotic or analyzing J2EE, you can assume that WALA is modelling a class hierarchy with two classloaders:

• Application: a classloader used to load application code.
• Primordial: a classloader used to load J2SE library code (e.g. java.*)

Classloaders operate via delegation: the classloaders form a tree with the primordial class loader at the root. So if the Application class loader fails to find a particular class, it will delegate to the Primordial loader to find the class.

So, if you have a class name in hand, and you don't know what loader it comes from, you can normally look it up in the Application loader: the IClass object you receive from ClassHierarchy.lookupClass will indicate the IClassLoader which actually found the class.

Given a string representing a class name, you this would look it up, trying the Application loader first, as follows:

• IClass klass = cha.lookupClass(TypeReference.findOrCreate(ClassLoaderReference.Application, s));

Implementation

The current ClassHierarchy implementation is intentionally mutable. When modelling synthetic classes, we occasionally create new classes on the fly depending on results of analysis, especially for J2EE.