Detection of J2EE Patterns based on Customizable Features

Abstract

Design patterns support extraction of design information for better program understanding, reusability and reengineering. With the advent of contemporary applications, the extraction of design information has become quite complex and challenging. These applications are multilingual in nature i.e. their design information is spread across various language components that are interlinked with each other. At present, no approach is available that is capable to extract design information of multilingual applications by using design patterns. This paper lays foundation for the analysis of multilingual source code for the detection of J2EE Patterns. J2EE Patterns provide design solutions for effective enterprise applications. A novel approach is presented for the detection of J2EE Patterns from multilingual source code of J2EE applications. For this purpose, customizable and reusable feature types are presented as definitions of J2EE Patterns catalogue. A prototype implementation is evaluated on a corpus that contains the repository of multilingual source code of J2EE Patterns. Additionally, the tool is tested on open source applications. The accuracy of the tool is validated by successfully recognizing J2EE Patterns from the multilingual source code. The results demonstrate the significance of customizable definitions of J2EE Pattern's catalogue and capability of prototype.