[recommenders-dev] Ask for suggestions on better implementation solution

[Cheng Zhang <cheng.zhang.stap@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

My name is Cheng Zhang, a student who is fascinated by this interesting 

project, Eclipse Recommenders. 

Inspired by Eclipse Recommenders and Marcel's FSE' 09 paper, my lab 

mates and I have been developing an argument guessing tool which tries 

to provide more sophisticated actual parameters/arguments for selected 

API methods (if they need some arguments). But due to our limited knowledge 

of Eclipse plug-in development, the current implementation is not standard, 

that is, we directly modified the source code of JDT, instead of using some 

extension points.

More specifically, we focus on the org.eclipse.jdt.ui project, which provides 

the default parameter recommendations. We find out that 

ParameterGuessingProposal extends JavaCompletionProposal, which 

represents the best guess completion for each parameter of a method, 

in org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.text.java package. Our modifications of default JDT 

project are all limited in this class.

The only method we have changed is guessParameters(char[][] parameterNames), 

in which JDT gets all the accessible local variables, selects and ranks them and 

shows them to end users. Here we just call our recommendation engine, and 

combine our results with default recommendations, before JDT returning these 

to users. The context information which JDT has already prepared is enough for 

us to perform our recommendations.

Would you please give me some suggestions on better implementation solutions? 

I think our current solution is non-standard, uneasy to install, and thus probably 

unacceptable for serious users.

Thanks,

Cheng