Uma abordagem para adaptação de clientes do Java Collections Framework baseada em técnicas de migração de APÌs.

Abstract

Despite the API diversity that the Java Collections Framework (JCF) provides, with diverse implementations for several data structures, developers may choose inappropriate interfaces or classes, in terms of efficiency or purpose. This may happen due to insufficient API documentation or the lack of thoughtful analysis by the developer according to context requirements. A possible solution is manual replacement, in parallel with an analysis of the program context. However, this is tiresome and error-prone, discouraging the modification. In this work, we define a semi-automatic approach for (i) the selection of interfaces and implementation within the JCF and (ii) the modification of JCF clients, based on API migration techniques. The approach helps the user in choosing the most appropriate collection, based on requirements collected by means of simple yes/no questions. The selection is resolved with a decision tree that, from the answers given by the developer, decides which is the most adequate interface (and implementation) from the JCF. After this decision, the actual program modification is performed by means of adapters, minimizing the source code modification We evaluate the approach, as implemented in a supporting tool,with an experimental study comprising computer science students randomly distributed into groups,whose task was performing changes to JCF clients by different methods (manually, using Eclipse’s Java Search and our approach); the results were evaluated on quality, effort and time spent. We found that most students had a hard time choosing the right interface or implementation for the given requirements. Our approach seemed to improve the effort of selecting the best collection for the requirement, saving sometime in the process. Regarding the quality of the collection selected, we found the same behavior using both tools.