  Software designers and developers are increasingly relying on application
frameworks as first-class design concepts. They instantiate the services that
frameworks provide to implement various architectural tactics and patterns. One
of the challenges in using frameworks for such tasks is the difficulty of
learning and correctly using frameworks' APIs. This paper introduces a
learning-based approach called ArCode to help novice programmers correctly use
frameworks' APIs to implement architectural tactics and patterns. ArCode has
several novel components: a graph-based approach for learning specification of
a framework from a limited number of training software, a program analysis
algorithm to eliminate erroneous training data, and a recommender module to
help programmers use APIs correctly and identify API misuses in their programs.
We evaluated our technique across two popular frameworks: JAAS security
framework used for authentication and authorization tactic and Java RMI
framework used to enable remote method invocation between client and server and
other object-oriented patterns. Our evaluation results show (i) the feasibility
of using ArCode to learn the specification of a framework; (ii) ArCode
generates accurate recommendations for finding the next API call to implement
an architectural tactic/pattern based on the context of the programmer's code;
(iii) it accurately detects API misuses in the code that implements a
tactic/pattern and provides fix recommendations. Comparison of ArCode with two
prior techniques (MAPO and GrouMiner) on API recommendation and misuse
detection shows that ArCode outperforms these approaches.
