18.08.2011
Eclipse Code Recommenders
Marcel Bruch
Abstract
Application frameworks have become an integral part of today’s software development – this is hardly surprising given their promised benefits such as reduced costs, higher quality, and shorter time to market. But using an application framework is not free of cost. Before frameworks can be used efficiently, software developers have to learn their correct usage which often results in high initial training costs.
However, framework usages frequently follow typical patterns that manifest themselves in source code of applications that use these frameworks – and thus can be extracted from code and directly reused to guide novice f developers when learning these frameworks. The code recommenders project facilitates this reuse of collective knowledge by automatically collecting such information from code and brings back this knowledge into the IDE by means of intelligent code completion, extended (usage-driven) javadocs, smart api-misuse detectors, personalized code search engines and a novel stacktrace search engine .
This talk introduces Eclipse Code Recommenders, the latest Eclipse incubator project under the umbrella of the Eclipse Technology top-level project. The talk will contain two parts. The first part introduces Code Recommenders and shows its tools in action. In the second part of the session we’ll create new recommendation models for Android APIs – live.
Speaker
Marcel Bruch is a research assistant at Darmstadt University of Technology. He works on novel concepts to support developers in learning new frameworks and APIs. He is founder and project lead of the Eclipse Code Recommenders project, a research project that aims to leverage the wisdom of the crowds and bring this knowledge back into the Eclipse IDE.
