API Document Quality for Resolving Deprecated APIs

2014 21st Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference Pub Date : 2014-12-01 DOI:10.1109/APSEC.2014.87

Deokyoon Ko, Kyeongwook Ma, S. Park, Suntae Kim, Dongsun Kim, Yves Le Traon

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引用次数: 24

Abstract

Using deprecated APIs often results in security vulnerability or performance degradation. Thus, invocations to deprecated APIs should be immediately replaced by alternative APIs. To resolve deprecated APIs, most developers rely on API documents provided by service API libraries. However, the documents often do not have sufficient information. This makes many deprecated API usages remain unresolved, which leads programs to vulnerable states. This paper reports a result of studying document quality for deprecated APIs. We first collected 260 deprecated APIs of eight Java libraries as well as the corresponding API documents. These documents were manually investigated to figure out whether it provides alternative APIs, rationales, or examples. Then, we examined 2,126 API usages in 249 client applications and figured out whether those were resolved in the subsequent versions. This study revealed that 1) 3.6 APIs was deprecated and 3.6 deprecated APIs are removed from the library a month on average, 2) only 61% of API documents provided alternative APIs while rationale and examples were rarely documented, and 3) 62% of deprecate API usages in client applications were resolved if the corresponding API documents provided alternative APIs while 49% were resolved when the documents provided no alternative APIs. Based on these results, we draw future directions to encourage resolving deprecated APIs.

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解决弃用API的API文档质量

使用已弃用的api通常会导致安全漏洞或性能下降。因此，对已弃用的api的调用应该立即用可选的api替换。为了解决已弃用的API，大多数开发人员依赖于服务API库提供的API文档。然而，这些文件往往没有足够的信息。这使得许多被弃用的API用法仍然无法解决，从而导致程序处于易受攻击的状态。本文报告了对已弃用api的文档质量的研究结果。我们首先收集了8个Java库的260个弃用API以及相应的API文档。我们对这些文档进行了手工调查，以确定它是否提供了可替代的api、基本原理或示例。然后，我们检查了249个客户机应用程序中的2126个API用法，并确定这些用法是否在后续版本中得到了解决。这项研究表明，1)平均每月有3.6个API被弃用，3.6个被弃用的API被从库中删除;2)只有61%的API文档提供了替代API，而基本原理和示例很少被记录;3)如果相应的API文档提供了替代API，则解决了客户端应用程序中62%的弃用API用法，而当文档没有提供替代API时，则解决了49%。基于这些结果，我们绘制了鼓励解决不推荐的api的未来方向。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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2014 21st Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

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