BAT2XML: XML-based Java Bytecode Representation

The creation, transformation and analysis of bytecode is widespread. Nevertheless, several problems related to the reusability and comprehensibility of the results and tools exist. In particular, the results of tools for bytecode analysis are usually represented in proprietary tool dependent ways, which makes it hard to build more sophisticated analysis on top of the results generated by tools for lower-level analysis.Furthermore, intermediate results, such as e.g., the results of basic control flow and dataflow analysis, are usually not explicitly represented at all; though, required by many more sophisticated analysis. This lack of a common format, for the well structured representation of the (intermediate) results of code analysis, makes the creation of new tools or the integration of the results generated by different tools costly and ineffective. To solve the highlighted problems, we propose a higher-level XML-based representation of Java bytecode which is designed as a common platform for the creation and transformation of bytecode and explicitly enables the integration of arbitrary information generated by different tools for static code analysis.