ArCode: Facilitating the Use of Application Frameworks to Implement Tactics and Patterns

TL;DR

ArCode is a novel learning-based tool that helps novice programmers correctly use application frameworks' APIs to implement architectural tactics and patterns, improving API recommendation and misuse detection accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces ArCode, a new approach combining graph-based learning, program analysis, and recommendation modules to assist in framework API usage for architectural patterns.

Findings

ArCode effectively learns framework specifications from limited data.

It accurately recommends next API calls based on code context.

It outperforms prior techniques in API recommendation and misuse detection.

Abstract

Software designers and developers are increasingly relying on application frameworks as first-class design concepts. They instantiate the services that frameworks provide to implement various architectural tactics and patterns. One of the challenges in using frameworks for such tasks is the difficulty of learning and correctly using frameworks' APIs. This paper introduces a learning-based approach called ArCode to help novice programmers correctly use frameworks' APIs to implement architectural tactics and patterns. ArCode has several novel components: a graph-based approach for learning specification of a framework from a limited number of training software, a program analysis algorithm to eliminate erroneous training data, and a recommender module to help programmers use APIs correctly and identify API misuses in their programs. We evaluated our technique across two popular frameworks: JAAS security framework used for authentication and authorization tactic and Java RMI framework used to enable remote method invocation between client and server and other object-oriented patterns. Our evaluation results show (i) the feasibility of using ArCode to learn the specification of a framework; (ii) ArCode generates accurate recommendations for finding the next API call to implement an architectural tactic/pattern based on the context of the programmer's code; (iii) it accurately detects API misuses in the code that implements a tactic/pattern and provides fix recommendations. Comparison of ArCode with two prior techniques (MAPO and GrouMiner) on API recommendation and misuse detection shows that ArCode outperforms these approaches.