An Empirical Study of Method Chaining in Java

Nakamaru, Tomoki; Matsunaga, Tomomasa; Yamazaki, Tetsuro; Akiyama, Soramichi; Chiba, Shigeru

doi:10.1145/3379597.3387441

Cited by 12 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…A method invocation issues a call to a method and requires a receiver object, hence constructor calls or super() calls inside a constructor are not method chains. Similar to Nakamaru et al [21] (that we also refer to as the "original study" throughout this paper), we define a method chain as "a sequence of one or more method invocations joined by the '.' symbol" [21] and also define the length of a method chain "as the number of [method] invocations in the sequence" [21].…”

Section: A Methods Chains and Chain Lengthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar to Nakamaru et al [21] (that we also refer to as the "original study" throughout this paper), we define a method chain as "a sequence of one or more method invocations joined by the '.' symbol" [21] and also define the length of a method chain "as the number of [method] invocations in the sequence" [21]. In Figure 1 we show some example method chains in Java.…”

Section: A Methods Chains and Chain Lengthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their analysis relied on computing two metrics: f n and r. f n (Equation 1) is the number of chains of length n over the number of not-chained method invocations (aka length 1) [21], where m n is the number of chains of length n. f n is not an average, but instead is computed for each file in the dataset, on a per-year basis.…”

Section: B Prior Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since it was not entirely clear if the programming community accepts the idea of method chaining or not, Nakamaru et al [21] studied how method chaining was (or was not) adopted in the Java programming language. They performed an empirical study on over 2.7k popular open-source Java projects from GitHub and looked at how often method chains were used.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this work, we first investigate if it is possible to replicate the results of Nakamaru et al [21] by building a similar dataset and writing our own analysis scripts. We built a dataset containing projects from their dataset (but cloned several years later) and discovered a few small inconsistencies when compared to their results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Method Chaining Redux: An Empirical Study of Method Chaining in Java, Kotlin, and Python

Dyer¹

2023

Preprint

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There are possible benefits and drawbacks to chaining methods together, as is often done in fluent APIs. A prior study investigated how Java developers chain methods in over 2.7k open-source projects. That study observed, for the dataset analyzed, that the use of method chaining in Java is popular and seems to be increasing over time. That study however was limited to a smaller sample of Java projects, and it is also not clear if the results generalize to other languages. In this work, we first replicate the prior results by building a similar dataset and our own analysis scripts. We then extend those results by analyzing a much larger dataset of 89k Java projects and generalizing to other programming languages by analyzing 26k Kotlin projects and 98k Python projects. The results show chaining is more popular in Java and Kotlin than Python, chaining use in Kotlin is not growing, and Python sees more use in non-testing code.

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Section: A Methods Chains and Chain Lengthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Methods Chains and Chain Lengthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Prior Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Method Chaining Redux: An Empirical Study of Method Chaining in Java, Kotlin, and Python

Dyer¹

2023

Preprint

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On the analysis of non-coding roles in open source development

Izquierdo¹,

Cabot

2021

Empir Software Eng

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The role of non-coding contributors in Open Source Software (OSS) is poorly understood. Most of current research around OSS development focuses on the coding aspects of the project (e.g., commits, pull requests or code reviews) while ignoring the potential of other types of contributions. Often, due to the assumption that these other contributions are not significant in number and that, in any case, they are handled by the same people that are also part of the “coding team”. This paper aims to investigate whether this is actually the case by analyzing the frequency and diversity of non-coding contributions in OSS development. As a sample of projects for our study we have taken the 100 most popular projects in the ecosystem of NPM, a package manager for JavaScript. Our results validate the importance of dedicated non-coding contributors in OSS and the diversity of OSS communities as, typically, a contributor specializes in a specific subset of roles. We foresee that projects adopting explicit policies to attract and onboard them could see a positive impact in their long-term sustainability providing they also put in place the right governance strategies to facilitate the migration and collaboration among the different roles. As part of this work, we also provide a replicability package to facilitate further quantitative role-based analysis by other researchers.

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Replication of a Study about the Impact of Method Chaining and Comments on Readability and Comprehension

Sampaio,

Sampaio

2024

2024 4th International Conference on Code Quality (ICCQ)

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An Empirical Study of Method Chaining in Java

Cited by 12 publications

References 15 publications

Method Chaining Redux: An Empirical Study of Method Chaining in Java, Kotlin, and Python

Method Chaining Redux: An Empirical Study of Method Chaining in Java, Kotlin, and Python

On the analysis of non-coding roles in open source development

Replication of a Study about the Impact of Method Chaining and Comments on Readability and Comprehension

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