APIExample: An effective web search based usage example recommendation system for java APIs

Authors:
Lijie Wang; Lu Fang; Leye Wang; Ge Li; Bing Xie; Fuqing Yang
Affiliations:
Software Institute, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;Software Institute, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;Software Institute, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;Software Institute, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;Software Institute, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;Software Institute, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Venue:
ASE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Year:
2011

Citing 8
Cited 1

Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems

VLHCC '04 Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing
Mica: A Web-Search Tool for Finding API Components and Examples

VLHCC '06 Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Assieme: finding and leveraging implicit references in a web search interface for programmers

Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Parseweb: a programmer assistant for reusing open source code on the web

Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
MAPO: Mining and Recommending API Usage Patterns

Genoa Proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on ECOOP 2009 --- Object-Oriented Programming
Adding Examples into Java Documents

ASE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Example-centric programming: integrating web search into the development environment

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Leveraging usage similarity for effective retrieval of examples in code repositories

Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

Generating API-usage example for project developers

Proceedings of the 5th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Programmers often learn how to use an API by studying its usage examples. There are many usage examples scattered in web pages on the Internet. However, it often takes programmers much effort to find out the desired examples from a large number of web pages by web search. This paper proposes a tool named APIExample that can extract usage examples for java APIs from web pages on the Internet and recommend them to programmers. Given a java API, the tool collects its related web pages from the Internet, extracts java code snippets and their surrounding descriptive texts embedded in the pages, then assembles them into usage examples for programmers. Furthermore, in order to help programmers capture more kinds of usages of the target API by browsing fewer examples, our tool clusters and ranks the listed examples based on the target API's usage. Besides, as a practical tool, APIExample provides multiple aspects of frequently-used information about using the target API in a concise user interface with friendly user experience. Two kinds of user-interaction style, a web search portal and an Eclipse plug-in, are now both publicly available.