Patent ID: 7137112

Claim:
A method for determining a class dependency that identifies a supporting class on which a target class depends, wherein the target class is defined in an object-oriented programming language, comprising: receiving a representation of the target class at a first platform-independent virtual machine; creating a model of the target class from the representation; analyzing the model within a class dependency analyzing to detect references to the supporting class; if a supporting class is detected, determining a class dependency for the supporting class; creating a list of dependent classes for the target class and supporting classes; sharing the list of dependent classes with a second platform-independent virtual machine so that the second platform-independent virtual machine does not need to create the list of dependent classes; and saving the list of dependent classes of the target class as well as the list of dependent classes of the supporting classes in a cache within the class dependency analyzer which stores class dependency information to facilitate subsequent lookups of dependent classes of the target class.