Overview and Evaluation of Constraint Validation Approaches in Java

Integrity is a dependability attribute partially ensured through runtime validation of integrity constraints. A wide range of different constraint validation approaches exists-ranging from simple if conditions over explicit constraint validation methods and contract specifications to constraints as first class runtime entities of an application. However, increased support for explicitness and flexibility often comes at the price of increased performance costs. To address this issue, we contribute with an overview and evaluation of different constraint validation approaches for the Java programming language with respect to implementation, maintainability and performance. Our results show that the benefits of some of the more advanced approaches are certainly worth their costs by introducing a runtime overhead of only two to ten times the runtime of the fastest approach while other approaches introduce runtime overheads of more than 100, which might be simply too slow in certain applications.