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

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

A.A. Sawant Software Engineering -

Romain Robbes Universidad de Santiago de Chile

A. Bacchelli Software Engineering -

Research Group

Software Engineering () (TU Delft)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2016.64

API Deprecation Mining software repositories

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http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0d05d29d-9391-4eda-bb09-2e4fdccd0318

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Published Date

07-10-2016

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

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.

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