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Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad

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Abstract

Today, when constructing software systems, many developers build their systems on top of frameworks. Eclipse is such a framework that has been in existence for over a decade. Like many other evolving software systems, the Eclipse platform has both stable and supported interfaces (“good”) and unstable, discouraged and unsupported interfaces (“bad”). In this study, we investigate Eclipse interface usage by Eclipse third-party plug-ins (ETPs) based on whether they use bad interfaces or not. The investigations, based on empirical analysis present the following observations. First, we discovered that 44 % of the 512 analyzed Eclipse third-party plug-ins depend on “bad” interfaces and that developers continue to use “bad” interfaces. Second, we have observed that plug-ins that use or extend at least one “bad” interface are comparatively larger and use more functionality from Eclipse than those that use only “good” interfaces. Third, the findings show that the ETPs use a diverse set of “bad” interfaces. Fourth, we observed that the reason why the bad interfaces are being eliminated from the ETPs’ source code is, because (ETP developers believe) these non-APIs will cause incompatibilities when a version of the ETP is ported to new Eclipse SDK release. Finally, we observed that when developers eliminate problematic “bad” interfaces, they either re-implement the same functionality in their own API, find equivalent SDK good interfaces, or completely delete the entities in the ETPs’ source code that use the functionality from the “bad” interfaces.

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Notes

  1. http://www.eclipse.org

  2. In the rest of the paper, the word SDK refers to Eclipse SDK.

  3. In this paper the use the term interfaces to refer to Java classes and interfaces.

  4. In this paper we will use the following words interchangeably: API and a good interface; non-API and a bad interface.

  5. We stress that the median of the difference is not the same as the difference in medians.

  6. One of the ETPs, ShellEd, had one unused non-API import in its early versions. This ETP now belongs Classification II ETPs. Five of the remaining ETPs are analyzed below.

  7. The ETP gted had an unused non-API in one of the intermediate versions. This ETP should be categorized as a good ETP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    John Businge, Alexander Serebrenik & Mark G. J. van den Brand

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  1. John Businge
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  2. Alexander Serebrenik
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  3. Mark G. J. van den Brand
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Correspondence to Alexander Serebrenik.

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Businge, J., Serebrenik, A. & van den Brand, M.G.J. Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad. Software Qual J 23, 107–141 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-013-9221-3

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