Uncovering the Secrets of the Maven Repository: Analysis of Library Sizes in Maven Central

This research explores the size variations of artifacts in Maven Central, a repository containing a large collection of Java artifacts. This analysis sheds light on the coding habits and dependency management ecosystems within Maven Central, emphasizing the importance of managing artifact sizes effectively. It also provides valuable insights to...

Dead Links and Lost Code: Investigating the State of Source Code Repositories in Maven Central Repository Packages: An Empirical Study

Maven Central serves as the de-facto repository for distributing free and open-source Java libraries and components. Evaluating its present state and overall robustness is pivotal for enabling the community to make well-informed decisions concerning its future progression. Such informed decisions would undoubtedly benefit the collective...

Uncovering Secrets of the Maven Repository: Maven packaging

Maven, a widely adopted software ecosystem for Java libraries, plays a critical role in the development and deployment of software applications. However, there exists a limited understanding of the composition and characteristics of the Maven repository, leaving users and contributors unaware of the contents they interact with. This research...

Uncovering secrets of the Maven Repository: Java Build Aspects: An empirical analysis

The Maven Central Repository hosts over 11 million packages. As Maven itself is a build tool for Java, the majority of these packages are Java archives.<br/>This research aims to analyze these packages and look into various build aspects of these projects (the research questions): are Java modules used, what Java versions are used and how is the...

On the relation of method popularity to breaking changes in the Maven ecosystem

Software reuse is a common practice in modern software engineering to save time and energy while accelerating software delivery. Dependency managers like MAVEN offer a large ecosystem of reusable libraries that build the backbone of software reuse. Breaking changes, i.e., when an update to a library introduces incompatible changes that break...

Crowd-sourced Collection and Analysis of Software Packages

The escalating complexity of software systems in the digital age heavily relies on reusable code collections(packages) for their development and operation. Despite the numerous advantages of pre-existing libraries, managing dependencies can be intricate and time-consuming. This thesis focuses on enhancing package management tools through a...

On the Effect of Transitivity and Granularity on Vulnerability Propagation in the Maven Ecosystem

Reusing software libraries is a pillar of modern software engineering. In 2022, the average Java application depends on 40 third-party libraries. Relying on such libraries exposes a project to potential vulnerabilities and may put an application and its users at risk. Unfortunately, research on software ecosystems has shown that the number of...

Analyzing the Criticality of Apache Maven Packages Through a Temporal Dependency Graph

Developers rely on different software to improve their efficiency as to reuse parts of code and be able to maintain it with ease, which is why open source software libraries have gained much pop- ularity over the past years. This paper analyzes what are the most used packages from Apache Maven, which is a build automation tool used primarily for...

API evolution on Maven Central: do developers adhere to semantic versioning?

In this paper, we investigate whether developers of artifacts on Maven Central adhere to semantic versioning. We also investigate whether there is a link between violations in semantic versioning and the popularity of the violating method. Developers can violate semantic versioning by removing or altering methods in their API, which we refer to...

Method Popularity Distributions of Software Artefacts within Maven Central

Even though previous studies have studied software artefacts on a package level, little research has been done on a method level. In this work, we perform a method-level analysis to determine how popularity disperses among methods within software libraries of Maven Central. We analyse 384 software artefacts with three different metrics:...

An exploratory study about extent of use of released packages in the Maven Central Repository

Maven Central Repository hosts over 9 million repositories which ease software reuse. Since its appearance, Maven has been studied and character- ized using different popularity and quality metrics, in order to identify defining patterns and possible improvements. This study aims to analyze extent of use of packages released in the Maven Central...

Looking at changes in popularity in the Maven ecosystem

We look at the Maven eco-system and how popularity of packages and its methods change. We want to know if there are any trends that can help developers more efficiently use their time. To look at the popularity we do package analysis and method analysis. We find that there is no correlation between time and popularity on both the package and the...

Origin, Impact and Cost of Interface Instability

Third-party libraries are used frequently in modern software development. Websites that are visited millions of times a day often make heavy use of open-source software libraries. As a software developer, using these libraries has a number of advantages. Developers save time and effort because functionality does not have to be rebuilt from...