A Tree-Based Approach to Support Refactoring in Multi-Language Software Applications

摘要

Developers build software applications using different programming languages, so they can benefit from the programming languages' specific advantages. To allow an interaction of different programming languages, each programming language offers Application Programming Interfaces (API) to be called. However, such interactions pose challenges for source-code refactoring across programming languages. To this end, we present a generalized approach to refactoring in multi-language software applications based on graphs of trees. To illustrate the broad application of our approach, we implement a library that builds the foundation for two tools that support the refactoring of database applications implemented in Java and Java applications that invoke code of the functional programming language Clojure.