EUKLAS: Supporting Copy-and-Paste Strategies for Integrating Example Code

Researchers have paid increasing attention in recent years to the fact that much development occurs though example modification. Helping programmers with some of the pit-falls and vagaries of working with example code is the goal of our tool, called Euklas. It helps developers to integrate JavaScript example code into their own projects by using familiar IDE interaction techniques of the Eclipse IDE. The Euklas plugin uses static, heuristic source code checks to highlight potential errors and to recommend potential fixes, when incomplete sections of code are copied from a work-ing JavaScript example and pasted into the program being edited. The most unique feature of the tool is the ability to automatically import missing variable and function defini-tions from an example file into a new project file. Our preliminary user study of Euklas suggests that it supports users in fixing errors more easily.