Skip to content

Update master thesis topics: add empirical study on API difference to… #73

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
monperrus merged 1 commit into from
Sep 10, 2025
Merged

Update master thesis topics: add empirical study on API difference to… #73

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
18 changes: 17 additions & 1 deletion master-thesis.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -6,8 +6,24 @@ title: Open Master Thesis Topics in Project Chains

Project Chains hosts master's students for their theses, here are available topics. See [main page](/) for completed theses.

### Empirical Study of API Difference Tools for Java Dependencies
Contact: Frank Reyes Garcia

Java applications rely extensively on external libraries, which are frequently updated and modified. As these libraries evolve, changes to their public APIs can introduce breaking changes, binary incompatibilities, or subtle behavioral issues that may impact client projects.
Detecting and understanding these API changes is critical for maintaining software reliability and facilitating safe dependency updates.
Several tools such as [roseau](https://github.com/alien-tools/roseau/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file), [japicmp](https://siom79.github.io/japicmp/), [Revapi](https://revapi.org/), and [Clirr](https://clirr.sourceforge.net/) have been developed to analyze and report API differences between library versions.
This thesis will conduct a comprehensive comparative study of leading API diff tools, applying them to a diverse set of real-world open-source Java projects.
The evaluation will focus on each tool’s ability to detect and classify different types of API changes (e.g., breaking, non-breaking, additions, deprecations).
The outcome will be a benchmark and critical analysis of existing API diff tools and a dataset of API changes in real-world Java libraries.

Related Work:

[1] [API evolution and compatibility: A data corpus and tool evaluation](https://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2017_04/article2.pdf)

[2] [Understanding the Impact of APIs Behavioral Breaking Changes on Client Applications](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643782)

### How prevalent is Maven Class Hijacking?
Contact: Aman Sharma, Frank Reyes Garçia
Contact: Aman Sharma, Frank Reyes Garcia
Copy link
Copy Markdown
Member

@algomaster99 algomaster99 Sep 10, 2025

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Is there no cidella? I thought I was Spanish A1 atleast.


Maven Class Hijacking [1] is a supply chain attack where a legitimiate Java class deep in the dependency tree can act malicious by shadowing a legitimate Java class that one declares directly.
We want to explore how prevalent the condition "infection dependency precedes the gadget dependency" is.
Expand Down