On the reaction to deprecation of clients of 4 + 1 popular Java APIs and the JDK

Sawant, Anand Ashok; Robbes, Romain; Bacchelli, Alberto

doi:10.1007/s10664-017-9554-9

Cited by 39 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…In a large-scale study, Robbes et al [6] assess the impact of API deprecation in a Smalltalk ecosystem. Recently, the authors also evaluated the impact in the context of the Java programming language [43], [44]. In this study, they found that some API deprecation have large impact on the ecosystem under analysis and that the quality of deprecation messages should be improved.…”

Section: Studies On Api Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why and how Java developers break APIs

Brito

Xavier

Hora

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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Modern software development depends on APIs to reuse code and increase productivity. As most software systems, these libraries and frameworks also evolve, which may break existing clients. However, the main reasons to introduce breaking changes in APIs are unclear. Therefore, in this paper, we report the results of an almost 4-month long field study with the developers of 400 popular Java libraries and frameworks. We configured an infrastructure to observe all changes in these libraries and to detect breaking changes shortly after their introduction in the code. After identifying breaking changes, we asked the developers to explain the reasons behind their decision to change the APIs. During the study, we identified 59 breaking changes, confirmed by the developers of 19 projects. By analyzing the developers' answers, we report that breaking changes are mostly motivated by the need to implement new features, by the desire to make the APIs simpler and with fewer elements, and to improve maintainability. We conclude by providing suggestions to language designers, tool builders, software engineering researchers and API developers.

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Section: Studies On Api Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why and how Java developers break APIs

Brito

Xavier

Hora

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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“…The trade-off between healthy levels of diversity in a system (here, the Maven Central ecosystem) and the challenges of redundancy and noise is necessary and very natural. Biological studies insist on the importance of keeping less fit or even unexpressed genes as genetic material that is necessary in order to adapt to unpredictable environmental changes [21], [22]. Our study reveals that the immutability of Maven artifacts provides the material for libraries to eventually fit the needs of various users, which eventually results in the emergence of diverse popular and timely versions.…”

Section: A Supporting the Emergence Of Software Diversitymentioning

confidence: 87%

The Emergence of Software Diversity in Maven Central

Soto-Valero¹,

Benelallam²,

Harrand³

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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Maven artifacts are immutable: an artifact that is uploaded on Maven Central cannot be removed nor modified. The only way for developers to upgrade their library is to release a new version. Consequently, Maven Central accumulates all the versions of all the libraries that are published there, and applications that declare a dependency towards a library can pick any version. In this work, we hypothesize that the immutability of Maven artifacts and the ability to choose any version naturally support the emergence of software diversity within Maven Central. We analyze 1,487,956 artifacts that represent all the versions of 73,653 libraries. We observe that more than 30% of libraries have multiple versions that are actively used by latest artifacts. In the case of popular libraries, more than 50% of their versions are used. We also observe that more than 17% of libraries have several versions that are significantly more used than the other versions. Our results indicate that the immutability of artifacts in Maven Central does support a sustained level of diversity among versions of libraries in the repository.

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“…Prior studies [5], [6] found that Android is evolving at an average rate of 115 API updates per month. Such evolution may entail arbitrary release schedules and API deprecation durations and may involve removing functionality without prior warning [7]. Therefore, users must regularly study the changes to existing APIs and decide whether they need to migrate their code to adopt the changes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A3: Assisting Android API Migrations Using Code Examples

Lamothe

Shang

Chen

2022

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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The fast-paced evolution of Android APIs has posed a challenging task for Android app developers. To leverage the newly and frequently released APIs from Android, developers often must spend considerable effort on API migrations. Prior research work and Android official documentation typically provide enough information to guide developers in identifying both the changed API calls that need to be migrated and the corresponding API calls in the new version of Android (what to migrate). However, the API migration task is still challenging since developers lack the knowledge of how to migrate the API calls. In addition to the official documentation, there exist code examples, such as Google Samples, that illustrate the usage of APIs. We posit that by analyzing the changes of API usage in code examples, we may be able to learn API migration patterns to assist developers with API migrations.In this paper, we propose an approach that automatically learns API migration patterns from code examples and applies these patterns to the source code of Android apps for API migration. To evaluate our approach, we migrate API calls in open source Android apps by learning API migration patterns from both public and manually generated code examples. We find that our approach can successfully learn API migration patterns and provide API migration assistance in 71 out of 80 cases. In particular, our approach can either automatically migrate API calls with little to no extra modifications needed or provide guidance to assist with the migrations. Our approach can be adopted by Android developers to reduce the effort they spend on regularly migrating Android APIs.

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On the reaction to deprecation of clients of 4 + 1 popular Java APIs and the JDK

Cited by 39 publications

References 50 publications

Why and how Java developers break APIs

Why and how Java developers break APIs

The Emergence of Software Diversity in Maven Central

A3: Assisting Android API Migrations Using Code Examples

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