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Apatite: a new interface for exploring APIs

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We present Apatite, a new tool that aids users in learning and understanding a complex API by visualizing the common associations between its various components. Current object-oriented API documentation is usually navigated in a fixed tree structure, starting with a package and then filtering by a specific class. For large APIs, this scheme is overly restrictive, because it prevents users from locating a particular action without first knowing which class it belongs to. Apatite's design instead enables users to search across any level of an API's hierarchy. This is made possible by the introduction of a novel interaction technique that presents popular items from multiple categories simultaneously, determining their relevance by approximating the strength of their association using search engine data. The design of Apatite was refined through iterative usability testing, and it has been released publicly as a web application.

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References

[1]
Beaton, J., Jeong, S.Y., Xie, Y., Stylos, J. and Myers, B.A. "Usability Challenges for Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture APIs," VL/HCC'08. Sept, 2008, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany. pp. 193--196.
[2]
Chau, D.H. and Myers, B. "What to Do When Search Fails: Finding Information by Association", Proceedings CHI'08. Florence, Italy, April, 2008. pp. 999--1008.
[3]
Holmes, R. and Walker, R.J. "A Newbie's Guide to Eclipse APIs", International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories. pp. 149--152.
[4]
Jeong, S.Y., Xie, Y., Beaton, J., Myers, B.A., Stylos, J., Ehret, R., Karstens, J., Efeoglu, A., and Busse, D.K. "Improving Documentation for eSOA APIs Through User Studies", Second International Symposium on End User Development (IS--EUD'09), March, 2009. Siegen, Germany. Springer-Verlag, LNCS 5435, pp. 86--105.
[5]
Stylos, J. "Making APIs More Usable with Improved API Designs, Documentation and Tools." Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, May 2009.
[6]
Stylos, J. and Myers, B.A. "Mica: A Programming Web-Search Aid", VL/HCC'06. Sept, 2006, Brighton, UK. pp. 195--202.
[7]
Stylos, J., Faulring, A., Yang, Z., and Myers, B.A. "Improving API Documentation Using API Usage Information", VL/HCC'09, Sept, 2009. Corvallis, Oregon. pp. 119--126.

Cited By

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  • (2024)Meta-Manager: A Tool for Collecting and Exploring Meta Information about CodeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642676(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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  • (2022)Generating Clarifying Questions for Query Refinement in Source Code Search2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00028(140-151)Online publication date: Mar-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. api documentation
  2. browsing
  3. search tools
  4. visualizations
  5. web applications

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Meta-Manager: A Tool for Collecting and Exploring Meta Information about CodeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642676(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2022)A Wizard of Oz Study Simulating API Usage Dialogues With a Virtual AssistantIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.304093548:6(1883-1904)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Generating Clarifying Questions for Query Refinement in Source Code Search2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00028(140-151)Online publication date: Mar-2022
  • (2021)Enriching API Documentation with Code Samples and Usage Scenarios from Crowd KnowledgeIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.291930447:6(1299-1314)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
  • (2021)Dialogue Management for Interactive API Search2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME52107.2021.00031(274-285)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • (2019)A Human-as-Sensors Approach to API Documentation Integration and Its Effects on Novice Programmers2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER.2019.8668026(197-206)Online publication date: Feb-2019
  • (2019)A Code Summarization Approach for Object Oriented Programs2019 International Conference on Innovation and Intelligence for Informatics, Computing, and Technologies (3ICT)10.1109/3ICT.2019.8910273(1-6)Online publication date: Sep-2019
  • (2019)What are the characteristics of popular APIs? A large-scale study on Java, Android, and 165 librariesSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-019-09476-zOnline publication date: 29-Nov-2019
  • (2016)Moldable, context-aware searching with SpotterProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/2986012.2986023(128-144)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
  • (2016)Augmenting API documentation with insights from stack overflowProceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/2884781.2884800(392-403)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
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