A newbie's guide to eclipse APIs

Eclipse has evolved from a fledgling Java IDE into a mature software ecosystem. One of the greatest benefits Eclipse provides developers is flexibility; however, this is not without cost. New Eclipse developers often find the framework to be large and confusing. Determining which parts of the framework they should be using can be a difficult task as Eclipse documentation tends to be either very high-level, focusing on the design of the framework, or low-level, focusing on specific APIs. We have developed a tool called PopCon that provides a bridge between high-level design documentation and low-level API documentation by statically analyzing a framework and several of its clients and providing a ranked list of the relative popularity of its APIs. We have applied PopCon to the Eclipse framework for this challenge to help newbie Eclipse developers identify some of the most relevant APIs for their tasks.