Jungloid mining: Helping to navigate the API jungle

Abstract

Reuse of existing code from class libraries and frameworks is often difficult because APIs are complex and the client code required to use the APIs can be hard to write. We observed that a common scenario is that the programmer knows what type of object he needs, but does not know how to write the code to get the object. In order to help programmers write API client code more easily, we developed techniques for synthesizing jungloid code fragments automatically given a simple query that describes that desired code in terms of input and output types. A jungloid is simply a unary expression; jungloids are simple, enabling synthesis, but are also versatile, covering many coding problems, and composable, combining to form more complex code fragments. We synthesize jungloids using both API method signatures and jungloids mined from a corpus of sample client programs. We implemented a tool, PROSPECTOR, based on these techniques. PROSPECTOR is integrated with the Eclipse IDE code assistance feature, and it infers queries from context so there is no need for the programmer to write queries. We tested PROSPECTOR on a set of real programming problems involving APIs; PROSPECTOR found the desired solution for 18 of 20 problems. We also evaluated PROSPECTOR in a user study, finding that programmers solved programming problems more quickly and with more reuse when using PROSPECTOR than without PROSPECTOR. Copyright 2005 ACM.