Identifying Components from Object-Oriented APIs Based on Dynamic Analysis

The reuse at the component level is generally more effective than the one at the object-oriented class level. This is due to the granularity level where components expose their functionalities at an abstract level compared to the fine-grained object-oriented classes. Moreover, components clearly define their dependencies through their provided and required interfaces in an explicit way that facilitates the understanding of how to reuse these components. Therefore, several component identification approaches have been proposed to identify components based on the analysis object-oriented software applications. Nevertheless, most of the existing component identification approaches did not consider co-usage dependencies between API classes to identify classes/methods that can be reused to implement a specific scenario. In this paper, we propose an approach to identify reusable software components in object-oriented APIs, based on the interactions between client applications and the targeted API. As we are dealing with actual clients using the API, dynamic analysis allows to better capture the instances of API usage. Approaches using static analysis are usually limited by the difficulty of handling dynamic features such as polymorphism and class loading. We evaluate our approach by applying it to three Java APIs with eight client applications from the DaCapo benchmark. DaCapo provides a set of pre-defined usage scenarios. The results show that our component identification approach has a very high precision.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

From Object-Oriented Applications to Component-Oriented Applications via Component-Oriented Architecture

10 pagesInternational audienceObject-oriented applications of significant size are often complex and therefore costly to maintain. Indeed, they rely on the concept of class which has low granularity with varied dependencies not always explicit. The component paradigm provides a projection space well-structured and of highest level for a better understanding through abstract architectural views. But it is possible to go further. It may also be the ultimate target of a complete process of re engineering. The end-to-end automation of this process is a subject on which literature has made very little attention. In this paper, we propose such a method to automatically transform an object-oriented application in an operational component-oriented application. We illustrate this method on a real Java application which is transformed in an operational OSGi application