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Title On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs.
Authors Anand Sawant, Romain Robbes, Alberto Bacchelli
Publication date 2016
Abstract Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous
resource--that is, when they are stable. Several studies have shown that
this is unfortunately not the case. Of those, a large-scale study of API
changes in the Pharo Smalltalk ecosystem documented several findings about
API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a partial
replication of this study, considering more than 25,000 clients of five
popular Java APIs on GitHub. This work addresses several shortcomings of the
previous study, namely: a study of several distinct API clients in a
popular, statically-typed language, with more accurate version information.
We compare and contrast our findings with the previous study and highlight
new ones, particularly on the API client update practices and the startling
similarities between reaction behavior in Smalltalk and Java.
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Pages 400-410
Conference name IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Publisher IEEE Press (Piscataway, NJ, USA)
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