Comprehensive Integration of API Usage Patterns

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive approach to integrating API usage patterns into programming tasks, focusing on variable synthesis and interactive assistance to improve developer efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces an empirical study of real-world API pattern integration and proposes an interactive method for synthesizing variables and recommending infrequent expressions.

Findings

Effective variable synthesis expressions identified

Approach assists developers in integrating APIs more efficiently

Faster task completion compared to existing methods

Abstract

Nowadays, developers often reuse existing APIs to implement their programming tasks. A lot of API usage patterns are mined to help developers learn API usage rules. However, there are still many missing variables to be synthesized when developers integrate the patterns into their programming context. To deal with this issue, we propose a comprehensive approach to integrate API usage patterns in this paper. We first perform an empirical study by analyzing how API usage patterns are integrated in real-world projects. We find the expressions for variable synthesis is often non-trivial and can be divided into 5 syntax types. Based on the observation, we promote an approach to help developers interactively complete API usage patterns. Compared to the existing code completion techniques, our approach can recommend infrequent expressions accompanied with their real-world usage examples according to the user intent. The evaluation shows that our approach could assist users to integrate APIs more efficiently and complete the programming tasks faster than existing works.