Automatic Extraction of Framework-Specific Models From Framework-Based Application Code

Framework-specific models represent the design of application code
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 framworks. For reverse engineering, we use
prototype implementations of the three FSMLs. Our results show that
for the considered frameworks rather simple code analyses are
suificient for automatically retrieving framework-specific models form
a larg ebody of application code with high precision and recall.