How Java APIs break – An empirical study

Jezek, Kamil; Dietrich, Jens; Brada, Přemek

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2015.02.014

Cited by 47 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…API evolution has also been studied for many other platforms. For example, Jezek et al [7] investigated the API changes and their impacts for Java programs. They have found that API instability is common and will eventually cause problems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies have indeed shown for example that building Linux APIs with implicit usage preconditions may lead to safety holes [5], [6]. Stability of Java APIs has also been found to be problematic [7]. Finally, the usage of unstable, discouraged and unsupported APIs of the Eclipse platform have been extensively investigated in recent work [8]- [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

Bissyandé

Traon

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Abstract-As Android becomes a de-facto choice of development platform for mobile apps, developers extensively leverage its accompanying Software Development Kit to quickly build their apps. This SDK comes with a set of APIs which developers may find limited in comparison to what system apps can do or what framework developers are preparing to harness capabilities of new generation devices. Thus, developers may attempt to explore in advance the normally "inaccessible" APIs for building unique API-based functionality in their app.The Android programming model is unique in its kind. Inaccessible APIs, which however are used by developers, constitute yet another specificity of Android development, and is worth investigating to understand what they are, how they evolve over time, and who uses them. To that end, in this work, we empirically investigate 17 important releases of the Android framework source code base, and we find that inaccessible APIs are commonly implemented in the Android framework, which are further neither forward nor backward compatible. Moreover, a small set of inaccessible APIs can eventually become publicly accessible, while most of them are removed during the evolution, resulting in risks for such apps that have leveraged inaccessible APIs. Finally, we show that inaccessible APIs are indeed accessed by third-party apps, and the official Google Play store has tolerated the proliferation of apps leveraging inaccessible API methods.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

Bissyandé

Traon

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In recent times, state-of-the-art API breakage detection tools [21,22,23,24,25] have been extensively used by both researchers [26], [27] and practitioners [11], [12] alike, especially for a systematic comparison of API checking Table 2). backward incompatibilities between library versions 3 As noted by Raemaekers [27], these tools are underestimationsas all detected breaking API changes will definitely break an API but some binary compatible APIs could be semantically incompatible.…”

Section: Api Breakage Detection Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, there has been large-scale empirical studies conducted on library migrations and evolution. Empirical studies by Raemakers et al [27,58], Jezek et al [26] and Joel et al [59] studied in-depth how libraries that reside in the Maven Central super-repository evolve and break APIs.…”

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical study on the impact of refactoring activities on evolving client-used APIs

Kula

Ouni

Germán

et al. 2018

Information and Software Technology

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Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts client users by breaking an API of the library. Objective: Our work aims to understand how clients that use a library API are affected by refactoring activities. We target popular libraries that potentially impact more library client users. Method: We distinguish between library APIs based on their client-usage (refereed to as client-used APIs) in order to understand the extent to which API breakages relate to refactorings. Our tool-based approach allows for a large-scale study across eight libraries (i.e., totaling 183 consecutive versions) with around 900 clients projects. Results: We find that library maintainers are less likely to break client-used API classes. Quantitatively, we find that refactoring activities break less than 37% of all client-used APIs. In a more qualitative analysis, we show two documented cases of where non-refactoring API breaking changes are motivated by other maintenance issues (i.e., bug fix and new features) and involve more complex refactoring operations. Conclusion: Using our automated approach, we find that library developers are less likely to break APIs and tend to break client-used APIs when addressing these maintenance issues.

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“…It contains scenarios resulting from the implicit inheritance from Object by any classes, and the fact that any Java array implicitly implements Cloneable and Serializable. Another example in this category is a change from a class to interface or viceversa [27,Section 4]. This is interesting because there is no difference between the invocation of class and interface methods in source-code.…”

Section: Miscellaneousmentioning

confidence: 99%

API Evolution and Compatibility: A Data Corpus and Tool Evaluation.

Jezek¹,

Dietrich²

2017

JOT

Self Cite

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The development of software components with independent release cycles is nowadays widely supported by multiple languages and frameworks. A critical feature of any such platform is to safeguard composition by ensuring backward compatibility of substituted components. In recent years, some tooling has been developed to help developers and DevOps engineers to establish whether components are backward compatible by means of static analysis. We investigate the state of the art in this space by benchmarking such tools for Java. For this purpose, we have developed a compact benchmark data set of less than 200KB. Using this dataset, we study possible API changes of Java libraries, and whether the tools investigated can detect them. We find that only a small number of tools suitable to analyse API evolution exist. Those tools are only infrequently maintained by small communities. All tools investigated have some shortcomings in that they fail to detect certain API incompatibilities.

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How Java APIs break – An empirical study

Cited by 47 publications

References 12 publications

Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

An empirical study on the impact of refactoring activities on evolving client-used APIs

API Evolution and Compatibility: A Data Corpus and Tool Evaluation.

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