Programmers often consult an online Q&A forum such as Stack Overflow to learn new APIs. This paper presents an empirical study on the prevalence and severity of API misuse on Stack Overflow. To reduce manual assessment effort, we design Maple, an API usage mining approach that extracts patterns from over 380K Java repositories on GitHub and subsequently reports potential API usage violations in...

With the introduction of code annotations in popular languages like Java and C#, several frameworks and platforms adopted a metadatabased API (Application Programming Interface). By using this approach, instead of extending classes, implementing interfaces or invoking configuration methods, the API demand its users to add metadata through annotations in their classes. This approach can bring se...

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-toapplication interaction. Developers using web APIs are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In order to understand the distress caused by this imposition on web API client developers we perform a semi-structured interview with six such developers. We also investigate how major web API pro...

Application programing interfaces promote reuse by facilitating interaction between software components and/or software libraries. API code templates are parameterized API scenarios that can be quickly instantiated by copy-and-pasting or through support from integrated development environments. They provide the skeletal structure of an API coding scenario and let developers simply “fill in the ...

Developers often face difficulties while using APIs. API usage patterns can aid them in using APIs efficiently, which are extracted from source code stored in software repositories. Previous approaches have mined repositories to extract API usage patterns by simply applying data mining techniques to the collection of method invocations of API objects. In these approaches, respective functional ...

The Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) provides a low-level debugging application programmers interface (API), which can be used to implement traditional source code debuggers but can also be useful to implement other dynamic program introspection tools. This paper describes our experience in using this API for the implementation of a high-level debugger. The API is difficult to use f...

FunnyQT1 is a new model querying and transformation approach which is implemented as an API for the functional, JVM-based Lisp-dialect Clojure. It provides several sub-APIs for implementing different kinds of queries and transformations. For example, there is a model-to-model transformation API, and there is an in-place transformation API for writing programmed graph transformations. FunnyQT cu...

We analyze the version history of software projects to determine API-related profiles of software developers. To this end, we identify API references in source-code changes and aggregate such references through suitable metrics that provide different views on the API usage per developer so that certain conclusions regarding developer experience or comparisons between developers become feasible....

The need to manually specify temporal properties of software systems is a major barrier to wider adoption of software model checking, because the specification of software temporal properties is a difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone process. To solve this problem, we propose to automatically extract temporal specifications from code. Our approach uses a model checker to check a set of AP...