Adding class invariants, preconditions, and postconditions to your regular Java objects is easy with C4J. Contracts for a class of an interface (the target) are implemented in a separate class (the contract). The contract is linked to the target at compile time using an annotation, and the contract code is tied to the target using instrumentation during class loading at runtime.
Contracts implementations have a reference to the instance of the target that it is verifying. This reference is a private instance variable of the contract class annotated with @Target. This target reference is used to write assertions describing the visible state of the target. The parameters the target method is invoked with are fully accessible to the contract class. Postconditions have also access to method return values and pre-invocation values (i.e. values of instance variables in the target prior to the method invocation).
There are several reasons for defining contracts in plain Java and in a separate class:
- You don't have to learn any new language constructs.
- You will get help from your IDE when implementing the contract (as opposed to implementing contracts in comment blocks).
- It is possible to put break points in your contract if you want to debug them.
- Separating the contract code from the application minimizes the risk of accidentally deploying the contracts together with your application.
- You get to keep your beautiful production code nice and clean without all the ugly assertions.