Can we extract a relevant, available, and self-contained core of the Maven ecosystem?

Extracting the pillars of the community, and their dependencies.

Bachelor thesis (2024)

Authors

M.C.L. van der Schoot Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

S. Proksch Software Engineering - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
C.B. Poulsen Programming Languages - EEMCS (supervisor 2)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2024 Mathijs van der Schoot
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Published Date

02-02-2024

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

The Maven ecosystem, with an emphasis on Maven Central, contains a plethora of toy-projects. This paper addresses this problem by formulating a core containing the pillars of the Maven ecosystem, such that it can be exploited for research concerning li- brary quality. The construction of said core is done by analyzing the availability, relevance and depen- dencies of packages in the Maven ecosystem. It involves answering questions regarding the distri- bution of library usages, the dependencies of popu- lar libraries and the effect of a usage threshold fil- tering mechanism. We found the popular libraries to be utilized to an incredible extend, while their less popular counterparts are seldom, if ever, used. Delving into the creation of a core reveals its non- trivial nature, requiring intricate knowledge of the Maven dependency mechanism and its accompany- ing tools to construct. This paper explores the com- plexities, nuances and considerations involved.

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