Survival of Eclipse Third-party Plug-ins
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Date
2012
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Abstract
Today numerous software systems are being developed
on top of frameworks. In this study, we analyzed the
survival of 467 Eclipse third-party plug-ins altogether having
1,447 versions. We classify these plug-ins into two categories:
those that depend on only stable and supported Eclipse APIs
and those that depend on at least one of the potentially
unstable, discouraged and unsupported Eclipse non-APIs.
Comparing the two categories of plug-ins, we observed that
the plug-ins depending solely on APIs have a very high source
compatibility success rate compared to those that depend on at
least one of the non-APIs. However, we have also observed that
recently released plug-ins that depend on non-APIs also have
a very high forward source compatibility success rate. This
high source compatibility success rate is due to the dependency
structure of these plug-ins: recently released plug-ins that
depend on non-A PIs predominantly depend on old Eclipse nonAPIs
rather than on newly introduced ones. Finally, we showed
that the majority of plug-ins hosted on SourceForge do not
evolve beyond the first year of release.
Description
Keywords
Eclipse, Third-party plug-ins, APIs, Non-APIs
Citation
Businge, J., Serebrenik, A., & van den Brand, M. (2012, September). Survival of Eclipse third-party plug-ins. In 2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) (pp. 368-377). IEEE.