Section: New Results

Tools for understanding applications

Remodularization Analysis Using Semantic Clustering. We report an experience on using and adapting Semantic Clustering to evaluate software remodularizations. Semantic Clustering is an approach that relies on information retrieval and clustering techniques to extract sets of similar classes in a system, according to their vocabularies. We adapted Semantic Clustering to support remodularization analysis. We evaluate our adaptation using six real-world remodularizations of four software systems. We report that Semantic Clustering and conceptual metrics can be used to express and explain the intention of the architects when performing common modularization operators, such as module decomposition. [37]

Towards a new package dependency model. Smalltalk originally did not have a package manager. Each Smalltalk implementation defined its own with more or less functionalities. Since 2010, Monticello/Metacello[Hen09] one package manager is available for open-source Smalltalks. It allows one to load source code packages with their dependencies. This package manager does not have all features we can find in well-known package managers like those used for the Linux operating system. We identify the missing features and propose a solution to reach a full-featured package manager. A part of this solution is to represent packages and dependencies as first-class objects, leading to the definition of a new dependency model. [32]

A Domain Specific Aspect Language for IDE Events. Integrated development environments (IDEs) have become the primary way to develop software. Besides just using the built-in features, it becomes more and more important to be able to extend the IDE with new features and extensions. Plugin architectures exist, but they show weaknesses related to unanticipated extensions and event handling. We argue that a more general solution for extending IDEs is needed. We present and discuss a solution, motivated by a set of concrete examples: a domain specific aspect language for IDE events. In it, join points are events of interest that may trigger the advice in which the behavior of the IDE extension is called. We show how this allows for the development of IDE plugins and demonstrate the advantages over traditional publish/subscribe systems. [21]

AspectMaps: Extending Moose to visualize AOP software. When using aspect-oriented programming the application implicitly invokes the functionality contained in the aspects. Consequently program comprehension of such a software is more intricate. To alleviate this difficulty we developed the AspectMaps visualization and tool. AspectMaps extends the Moose program comprehension and reverse engineering platform with support for aspects, and is implemented using facilities provided by Moose. We present the AspectMaps tool, and show how it can be used by performing an exploration of a fairly large aspect-oriented application. We then show how we extended the FAMIX meta-model family that underpins Moose to also provide support for aspects. This extension is called ASPIX, and thanks to this enhancement Moose can now also treat aspect-oriented software. Finally, we report on our experiences using some of the tools in Moose; Mondrian to implement the visualization, and Glamour to build the user interface. We discuss how we were able to implement a sizable visualization tool using them and how we were able to deal with some of their limitations. [20]