MAPO: Mining and Recommending API Usage Patterns

To improve software productivity, when constructing new software systems, programmers often reuse existing libraries or frameworks by invoking methods provided in their APIs. Those API methods, however, are often complex and not well documented. To get familiar with how those API methods are used, programmers often exploit a source code search tool to search for code snippets that use the API methods of interest. However, the returned code snippets are often large in number, and the huge number of snippets places a barrier for programmers to locate useful ones. In order to help programmers overcome this barrier, we have developed an API usage mining framework and its supporting tool called MAPO (Mining API usage Pattern from Open source repositories) for mining API usage patterns automatically. A mined pattern describes that in a certain usage scenario, some API methods are frequently called together and their usages follow some sequential rules. MAPO further recommends the mined API u...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Hao Zhong, Tao Xie, Lu Zhang, Jian Pei, Hong Mei
• Keywords: API Usage Mining, API Usage Patterns, ECOOP 2009, Programmers Produce Code, Programming Languages