Automated upgrading of component-based applications
Danny Dig, Ralph E. Johnson · 2006
Frameworks and libraries change their APIs. Migrating an application to the new API is tedious and disrupts the development process. Although some tools and ideas have been proposed to solve the evolution of APIs, most updates are done manually. Our study of the API changes in five components revealed that over 80% of the changes that break existing applications are caused by refactorings. This suggests that refactoring-based migration tools should be used to effectively upgrade applications. We propose an approach that is both automated and safe, without any overhead on the component producers. First, component refactorings are automatically detected (either inferred or recorded), then they are incorporated into applications by replaying.