Automatic extraction of framework-specific models from framework-based application code

Michal Antkiewicz, Thiago T. Bartolomei, Krzysztof Czarnecki

Abstract: Framework-specific models represent the design of pplicationcode from the framework viewpoint by showing how framework-provided concepts are implemented in the code. In this paper, we describe an experimental study of the static analyses necessary to automatically retrieve such models from application code. We reverse engineer a number of applications based on three open-source frameworks and evaluate the quality of the retrieved models. The models are expressed using framework-specific modeling languages(FSMLs), each designed for one of the open-source frameworks. For reverse engineering, we use prototype implementations of the three FSMLs. Our results show that for the considered frameworks rather simple code analysesare sufficient for automatically retrieving framework-specific models form a large body of application code with high precision and recall