On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs

Anand Sawant; Romain Robbes; Alberto Bacchelli

doi:10.1109/ICSME.2016.64

On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs

Anand Sawant, Romain Robbes, Alberto Bacchelli

Software Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volume › Conference contribution › Scientific › peer-review

44 Citations (Scopus)

115 Downloads (Pure)

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.

Original language	English
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	https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2016.64
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
Abbreviated title	ICSME
Country/Territory	United States
City	Raleigh
Period	2/10/16 → 10/10/16

Keywords

API
Mining software repositories
deprecation

Access to Document

10.1109/ICSME.2016.64

icsmeAccepted author manuscript, 790 KB

Cite this

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On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs. / Sawant, Anand; Robbes, Romain; Bacchelli, Alberto.
Proceedings - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2016. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE, 2016. p. 400-410.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volume › Conference contribution › Scientific › peer-review

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On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs

Abstract

Conference

Keywords

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