Co-evolution of the Eclipse SDK Framework and its Third-party Plug-ins
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Date
2013
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Abstract
Today, when constructing a new software system,
many developers build their systems on top of frameworks.
Eclipse framework is one such popular and widely adopted
framework that has been evolving for over a decade. Like
many other evolving software systems, the Eclipse SDK framework
has both stable and supported APIs (good interfaces)
and unstable, discouraged and unsupported non-APIs (bad
interfaces). However, despite being discouraged by Eclipse, in
our experience, the usage of bad interfaces is not uncommon.
In this thesis, by means of a series of empirical studies, we
quantify/qualify some the challenges faced by Eclipse thirdparty
plug-in developers in using the interfaces provided by the
Eclipse SDK framework. Furthermore, we propose solutions to
the identified challenges, like changes in development strategy
to both interface providers and interface users. In particular,
the lessons learned from this study can provide valuable
information in particular to the interface providers, i.e., Eclipse
SDK developers, and the interface uses, i.e., ETP developers,
in co-evolving the Eclipse framework. In general, the lessons
learned can be transferable to other framework ecosystem.
Description
Keywords
Eclipse, APIs, NNon-APIs, Plug-ins
Citation
Businge, J. (2013, March). Co-evolution of the Eclipse SDK framework and its third-party plug-ins. In 2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (pp. 427-430). IEEE. DOI 10.1109/CSMR.2013.64