Abstract
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous resource—that is, when they are stable. Several studies have shown that this is unfortunately not the case. Of those, a large-scale study of API changes in the Pharo Smalltalk
ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a partial replication of this study, considering
more than 25,000 clients of five popular Java APIs on GitHub. This work addresses several shortcomings of the previous study, namely: a study of several distinct API clients in a popular, statically-typed language, with more accurate version information. We compare and contrast our findings with the previous
study and highlight new ones, particularly on the API client update practices and the startling similarities between reaction behavior in Smalltalk and Java.
ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a partial replication of this study, considering
more than 25,000 clients of five popular Java APIs on GitHub. This work addresses several shortcomings of the previous study, namely: a study of several distinct API clients in a popular, statically-typed language, with more accurate version information. We compare and contrast our findings with the previous
study and highlight new ones, particularly on the API client update practices and the startling similarities between reaction behavior in Smalltalk and Java.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2016 |
Place of Publication | Los Alamitos, CA |
Publisher | IEEE |
Pages | 400-410 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-5090-3806-0 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 7 Oct 2016 |
Event | ICSME 2016: 32nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution - Raleigh, United States Duration: 2 Oct 2016 → 10 Oct 2016 Conference number: 32 |
Conference
Conference | ICSME 2016 |
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Abbreviated title | ICSME |
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Raleigh |
Period | 2/10/16 → 10/10/16 |
Keywords
- API
- Mining software repositories
- deprecation