article

On the reaction to deprecation of clients of 4 + 1 popular Java APIs and the JDK

Authors:

Anand Ashok Sawant,

Alberto BacchelliAuthors Info & Claims

Empirical Software Engineering, Volume 23, Issue 4

Pages 2158 - 2197

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9554-9

Published: 01 August 2018 Publication History

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 extend this study, by analyzing clients of both popular third-party Java APIs and the JDK API. This results in a dataset consisting of more than 25,000 clients of five popular Java APIs on GitHub, and 60 clients of the JDK API from Maven Central. 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. We make a comparison between reaction behavior for third-party APIs and JDK APIs, given that language APIs are a peculiar case in terms of wide-spread usage, documentation, and support from IDEs. Furthermore, we investigate the connection between reaction patterns of a client and the deprecation policy adopted by the API used.

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Cited By

Job RHora ASpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)Availability and Usage of Platform-Specific APIs: A First Empirical StudyProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3644925(27-31)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
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cover image Empirical Software Engineering

Empirical Software Engineering Volume 23, Issue 4

August 2018

649 pages

ISSN:1382-3256

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Copyright © Copyright © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

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Kluwer Academic Publishers

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 August 2018

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Cited By

Job RHora ASpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)Availability and Usage of Platform-Specific APIs: A First Empirical StudyProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3644925(27-31)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643991.3644925
Liu PZhao YFazzini MCai HGrundy JLi L(2023)Automatically Detecting Incompatible Android APIsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362473733:1(1-33)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624737
Wang YSun PPei LYu YXu CCheung SYu HZhu Z(2023)Plumber: Boosting the Propagation of Vulnerability Fixes in the npm EcosystemIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.324326249:5(3155-3181)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3243262
Liu PZhao YCai HFazzini MGrundy JLi LRyu SSmaragdakis Y(2022)Automatically detecting API-induced compatibility issues in Android apps: a comparative analysis (replicability study)Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3533767.3534407(617-628)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533767.3534407
Zhao YLi LLiu KGrundy JDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Towards automatically repairing compatibility issues in published Android appsProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510128(2142-2153)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510128
Harrand NBenelallam ASoto-Valero CBettega FBarais OBaudry B(2022)API beauty is in the eye of the clientsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111134184:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2021.111134
Haryono SThung FLo DJiang LLawall JKang HSerrano LMuller G(2022)AndroEvolve: automated Android API update with data flow analysis and variable denormalizationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10096-027:3Online publication date: 1-May-2022
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Lamothe MGuéhéneuc YShang W(2021)A Systematic Review of API Evolution LiteratureACM Computing Surveys10.1145/347013354:8(1-36)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2021
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Chen XAbdalkareem RMujahid SShihab EXia X(2021)Helping or not helping? Why and how trivial packages impact the npm ecosystemEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-020-09904-w26:2Online publication date: 1-Mar-2021
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Boldi PGousios G(2020)Fine-Grained Network Analysis for Modern Software EcosystemsACM Transactions on Internet Technology10.1145/341820921:1(1-14)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2020
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