Improving responsiveness in mobile apps via refactoring for asynchrony (invited talk)

Abstract

One contemporary development task is refactoring long-running, blocking synchronous code (e.g., accessing the web, database, or file system) into non-blocking asynchronous code. Asynchronous programming is in demand today because responsiveness is especially important on mobile devices. While major programming languages make asynchronous programming possible, they do not make it easy. In this invited talk we present our growing refactoring toolset that enables Android and Windows Phone developers to retrofit asynchrony. There are several challenges that our toolset addresses: reasoning about a programming model which inverts the flow of control, determining non-interference of asynchronous operations with the main thread of execution, converting from legacy callback-based idioms to the newer style, etc. Our empirical evaluation shows that our toolset is (i) highly applicable, (ii) accurate, (iii) safer than manual refactoring, (iv) it saves development effort, (v) its results have been accepted by the open-source developers, thus it is useful.