---
category: academic
type: academic
person: Yanxin Lu
date: 2013
source: gokhale_13_infer.pdf
---

# Inferring Likely Mappings between APIs

Amruta Gokhale, Vinod Ganapathy, Yogesh Padmanaban (Rutgers University)

ICSE 2013

Software developers often need to port applications written for a source platform to a target platform. A key task is to replace the source platform API with corresponding methods from the target platform API. This paper develops a novel approach to the problem of inferring likely mappings between the APIs of a source and target platform. The approach is tailored to the case where the source and target platform each have independently-developed applications that implement similar functionality. The authors observe that in building these applications, developers exercised knowledge of the corresponding APIs, and develop a technique to systematically harvest this knowledge and infer likely mappings between the APIs. The output is a ranked list of target API methods or method sequences that likely map to each source API method or method sequence. The prototype tool Rosetta was applied to infer likely mappings between the Java2 Platform Mobile Edition and Android graphics APIs.