A Dataset for API Usage

摘要

An Application Programming Interface (API) provides a specific set of functionalities to a developer. The main aim of an API is to encourage the reuse of already existing functionality. There has been some work done into API popularity trends, API evolution and API usage. For all the aforementioned research avenues there has been a need to mine the usage of an API in order to perform any kind of analysis. Each one of the approaches that has been employed in the past involved a certain degree of inaccuracy as there was no type check that takes place. We introduce an approach that takes type information into account while mining API method invocations and annotation usages. This approach accurately makes a connection between a method invocation and the class of the API to which the method belongs to. We try collecting as many usages of an API as possible, this is achieved by targeting projects hosted on GitHub. Additionally, we look at the history of every project to collect the usage of an API from earliest version onwards. By making such a large and rich dataset public, we hope to stimulate some more research in the field of APIs with the aid of accurate API usage samples.