Adoption and use of Java generics

Support for generic programming was added to the Java language in 2004, representing perhaps the most significant change to one of the most widely used programming languages today. Researchers and language designers anticipated this addition would relieve many long-standing problems plaguing developers, but surprisingly, no one has yet measured how generics have been adopted and used in practice. In this paper, we report on the first empirical investigation into how Java generics have been integrated into open source software by automatically mining the history of 40 popular open source Java programs, traversing more than 650 million lines of code in the process. We evaluate five hypotheses and research questions about how Java developers use generics. For example, our results suggest that generics sometimes reduce the number of type casts and that generics are usually adopted by a single champion in a project, rather than all committers. We also offer insights into why some features may be adopted sooner and others features may be held back.     

Component-based end-user database design for ecologists

To solve today’s ecological problems, scientists need well documented, validated, and coherent data archives. Historically, however, ecologists have collected and stored data idiosyncratically, making data integration even among close collaborators difficult. Further, effective ecology data warehouses and subsequent data mining require that individual databases be accurately described with metadata against which the data themselves have been validated. Using database technology would make documenting data sets for archiving, integration, and data mining easier, but few ecologists have expertise to use database technology and they cannot afford to hire programmers. In this paper, we identify the benefits that would accrue from ecologists’ use of modern information technology and the obstacles that prevent that use. We describe our prototype, the Canopy DataBank, through which we aim to enable individual ecologists in the forest canopy research community to be their own database programmers. The key feature that makes this possible is domain-specific database components, which we call templates. We also show how additional tools that reuse these components, such as for visualization, could provide gains in productivity and motivate the use of new technology. Finally, we suggest ways in which communities might share database components and how components might be used to foster easier data integration to solve new ecological problems.     

Refactoring Tools: Fitness for Purpose

Refactoring tools can improve the speed and accuracy with which developers create and maintain software—but only if they are used. In practice, tools are not used as much as they could be; this seems to be because sometimes they do not align with the refactoring tactic preferred by most programmers, a tactic the authors call "floss refactoring." They propose five principles that characterize successful floss-refactoring tools—principles that can help programmers to choose the most appropriate refactoring tools and also help toolsmiths to design tools that fit the programmer's purpose.