API evolution and compatibility: A data corpus and tool evaluation
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Date
2017-09-25
Open Access Location
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
AITO
Rights
Licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Abstract
The development of software components with independent release
cycles is nowadays widely supported by multiple languages and frameworks.
A critical feature of any such platform is to safeguard composition
by ensuring backward compatibility of substituted components. In recent
years, some tooling has been developed to help developers and DevOps
engineers to establish whether components are backward compatible by
means of static analysis. We investigate the state of the art in this space
by benchmarking such tools for Java. For this purpose, we have developed
a compact benchmark data set of less than 200KB. Using this dataset, we
study possible API changes of Java libraries, and whether the tools investigated
can detect them. We find that only a small number of tools
suitable to analyse API evolution exist. Those tools are only infrequently
maintained by small communities. All tools investigated have some shortcomings
in that they fail to detect certain API incompatibilities.
Description
Keywords
API, source, binary, compatibility, tools, byte-code, Java
Citation
Journal of Object Technology, 2017, 16 (4), pp. 1 - 23