Data-Driven Inference of API Mappings

Abstract

Porting mobile applications (apps) from one platform to another is one strategy used by developers to write cross-platform apps. One challenging task in porting is transforming the app so as to use the appropriate platform-specific APIs. We have proposed a novel approach to extract functionally equivalent API methods of two platforms that simplifies this task. Our approach is inspired by a technique in natural language processing domain which extracts a translation dictionary from non-parallel corpora of two natural languages. We demonstrate a prototype implementation of the proposed approach.