CoDocent: Support API Usage with Code Example and API Documentation

Abstract

API documentation and code example are two major resources to support API usage. To find the best way to use APIs within specific programming tasks, an effective strategy to link related APIs becomes critical. Currently, many code search engines have been proposed to solve this issue. Through those search results, programmers must manually traverse across all API documents to learn the referred API calls. To ensure the productivity in the style of programming with APIs, this work provides CoDocent to help programmers review code examples found by search engines. For each found code example, CoDocent can automatically link related API documents to provide diagrams as abstractions to reflect the semantics of API calls. Two evaluations are conducted to show the effectiveness of CoDocent in investigating and adapting API calls from code examples.