A Dataset For API Usage

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.