Identification of promoted eclipse unstable interfaces using clone detection technique
This addresses a specific issue for Eclipse client developers by providing a tool to identify promoted interfaces, though it is incremental as it applies an existing technique to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of identifying promoted unstable interfaces (non-APIs) in the Eclipse framework to help client developers avoid system failures during updates, using clone detection to find that 0.20% to 10.38% of non-APIs were promoted across 16 releases.
The Eclipse framework is a popular and widely used framework that has been evolving for over a decade. The framework provides both stable interfaces (APIs) and unstable interfaces (non-APIs). Despite being discouraged by Eclipse, client developers often use non-APIs which may cause their systems to fail when ported to new framework releases. To overcome this problem, Eclipse interface producers may promote unstable interfaces to APIs. However, client developers have no assistance to aid them to identify the promoted unstable interfaces in the Eclipse framework. We aim to help API users identify promoted unstable interfaces. We used the clone detection technique to identify promoted unstable interfaces as the framework evolves. Our empirical investigation on 16 Eclipse major releases presents the following observations. First, we have discovered that there exists over 60% non-API methods of the total interfaces in each of the analyzed 16 Eclipse releases. Second, we have discovered that the percentage of promoted non-APIs identified through clone detection ranges from 0.20% to 10.38%.