Helping Software Developers through Offline Repository Based API Searching in Data MiningIntegrated Environment

TL;DR

This paper proposes an offline API search framework to assist software developers by providing relevant API method suggestions, reducing latency and improving guidance during development.

Contribution

It introduces a novel offline repository-based API search approach that outperforms existing online search methods in guiding developers.

Findings

The offline approach reduces search latency compared to online methods.

The framework provides more accurate API recommendations.

It improves developer productivity by offering relevant API suggestions.

Abstract

Software development is getting changed so rapidly. It will be highly benefited if we can accelerate software development process by guiding developers. Appropriate guidelines and accurate recommendations to developers during development process can reduce software development expenses, as well as can save valuable times of developers. There are a number of approaches to speed up the software development process. It can be done through code assistance tools that help developers by recommending relevant items from searching particular repository of Application Programming Interface (API). Some approaches are based on online searching that have some drawbacks due to request and response latency as it has to deal with the extra-large files in a server. Developers generally uses previously completed resources as well as libraries or frameworks to generate relevant snippets which are supplied by the referral repository of APIs. Developers find it hard to choose the appropriate methods as there are thousands of methods in which some are not properly documented. In this paper we have proposed a concept and its respective framework to guide developers that suggests relevant API methods from an offline mined repository. From the investigation we made, we can say that our approach works much better than some of the existing approaches.