APISonar: Mining API usage examples. (10th October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hora, Andre
• Is Part Of: Software, practice & experience. Volume 51:Number 2(2021)
• Page Start: 319
• Page End: 352
• Publication Date: 2020-10-10
• Subjects: API usage examples -- framework -- library -- mining software repositories -- software maintenance; Computer software -- Periodicals; Computer programming -- Periodicals; Computer programs -- Periodicals; 005.3
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.2906
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0644

Abstract

Abstract: Developers spend a significant part of their time searching for code examples on the web. Often, they look for Application Programming Interface (API) usage examples, that is, how to use APIs provided by libraries and frameworks. For this purpose, several programming websites are available. Some programming websites provide manually created examples: unfortunately, as millions of APIs are available nowadays, they do not cover the majority of the APIs. To alleviate this limitation, other programming websites focus on automatically mining API usage examples from code repositories. To the best of our knowledge, however, these solutions are still very limited: they often present poor, duplicated, and similar API usage examples. In this article, we propose an approach, APISonar, to automatically mine API usage examples from code repositories. Our approach aims to overcome the limitations of current solutions: we focus on presenting readable and reusable API usage examples. We analyze millions of source files provided by 4486 software projects hosted on GitHub. Based on this data, we extract 11 million API usage examples about 1.5 million distinct APIs. We evaluate APISonar by assessing its quality and usage. We show that APISonar is a competitive solution, providing the best API examples in terms of readability and reusability, as compared with popular programming websites. Moreover, despite being a novel website, APISonar attracted a significant amount of users in a short period (3.7K users from 119 countries during 5 months). APISonar is available at www.apisonar.com.