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REmail - Integrating e-mail Communication in

1. REmail 3 1 Eclipse 3 1 1 Structure 3 1 2 Basics of plug in development 32 The evolution of REmal cosida 3 2 1 Early stages Liat Ries WG AO a de ee Sao ea 3 2 3 Threads of e mails A III ER RI 2 Se a ee 3 3 Implementation of REmail ea dl dde de ects ic 3 3 2 Result indexing 6 4044 0h eae beh a ae 3 3 3 Source formats ya Ca AE RAE RS 3 3 4 Views 3 3 5 Editor integration o oo e 3 3 6 Preferences 3 4 Using REmail 3 4 1 Installation vil viii viii Contents 3 4 2 Setting UP eee aa AI ee a 38 TEN 6 x dm dige bod oe ORE eM ade ow SS 42 A AE A AE es ee ee ge ee ee 43 3 4 5 Message Filtering e aaa eae ee 44 A ias 45 4 Case Study 47 4 1 Choosing a linking method 48 4 2 Refining results to obtain relevant information 50 4 2 1 Applying filters aay aS fede a Se aS oS PEERS 50 4 2 2 Selective result removal 51 4 2 3 E mail TEadaD lr Poe ees SR SR SS 51 43 COTE ena acevo be he Bec eames acc oh ay Ai ble eas Os dea 52 5 Conclusions 55 5 1 Summafy sss si sasda ka em ae ies RARE BA 55 5 2 Future Improvements sso 56 Bibliography 59 Figures 2 1 Strict regular expression as implemented in REmail 10 2 2 Loose regular expression as implemented in REmail 11 3 1 The Eclipse IDE srie seg ir O
2. We have developed REmail an Eclipse plug in to integrate e mail communi cation in the IDE It allows developers to seamlessly handle source code entities and e mails concerning the source code without ever exiting from the IDE Us ing lightweight linking techniques REmail retrieves all the e mails relevant to the chosen source code entities and makes them available to the developer ill lv Acknowledgements I want to say thanks to Alberto for all the help on this project for plenty of week to week meetings and his magical power to always point me in a right direction when I am a bit lost Professor Lanza for the great way of leading the Software Evolution course which pointed my interests towards this field and ultimately led my way to this project and for the supervision of this thesis Mate Marco and Rivaldi for not trying to distract me every night from writing this thesis Aida and Becky for their continuous support and interest in my thesis My parents without whose support I could never go to Switzerland and work on this project Czech and Swiss taxpayers for the lovely Erasmus grant And finally to M Budget energy drink vi Contents Contents List of Figures 1 Introduction 2 3 1 1 Goal of this project 1 2 Structure of the Document Background research 2 1 Communication between developers 2 2 E mail to code linking techniques
3. REmail Integrating e mail communication in the Eclipse IDE Master s Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Informatics presented by Vitezslav Humpa under the supervision of Prof Dr Michele Lanza and Alberto Bacchelli June 2010 I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been given the work presented in this thesis is that of the author alone the work has not been sub mitted previously in whole or in part to qualify for any other academic award and the content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program Vitezslav Humpa Lugano 4 June 2010 Abstract Developers of software systems have to communicate about the project they are building Especially when working in a distributed development team such as open source projects developers must use an asynchronous means of communi cation Studies tell us that e mails are by far the means of communication mostly used during the distributed development opposed to instant messaging commit comments or code comments Therefore we can imagine archives containing development e mails enclose essential information concerning various entities of the source code Unfortunately such information gets lost with time since relevant e mails are hard to retrieve
4. gt Glib private Action doubleClickAction Y Cy MET private IResource activeResource a 28 The constructor rkspace Log 8 Ex Xx BBY type filter text Message di Failed to get SVNTeamProvider for P vite thesis Views NLS unused message MenulconsPreferencePage default in SAA NLS unused message MenulconsPreferencePage iconSet in org tigris subversion subclipse ui m NLS unused message MenulconsPreferencePage restart in org tigris subversion subclipse ui me NLS unused message CommitCommentArea_6 in org tigris subversion subclipse ui messages Y n Writable Smart Insert 227 51 Figure 3 1 The Eclipse IDE 3 1 2 Basics of plug in development Any Eclipse distribution is a collection of different plug ins that together form a desired environment Unlike some other IDE s Eclipse itself is actually a small core that loads all present plug ins into place All we can see when using Eclipse are plug ins 7 In a clean installation most of the plug ins are part of core org eclipse package Every plug in extends the functionality of Eclipse by connecting itself into one or more extension points that are defined by other plug ins The same plug in can also define its own extension points to provide information to other plug ins Hence all the plug ins that are part of Eclipse define a MANIFEST MF and plugin xml files declaring amongst other things what plug in bundle
5. Developers loose no time communicating their ideas or describing problems thanks to the use of spoken language There can be misinterpretation or misunderstanding as in case of written communica tion but they can be resolved immediately 9 However face to face meetings 6 2 1 Communication between developers are not without drawbacks Presence of other developers is distracting Questions make developer loose focus on his task which he needs to regain later As opposed to electronic means of communication such spoken conversation itself is not stored Developers tend to create mental models of the system 9 If they envision such a model by talking with other developers they are likely to loose portion of the model comprehension with passing time unless they write down well organized notes Finally face to face communication is geographically limited which espe cially in open source community makes extremely hard to organize it in neces sary frequency There are many methods of electronic communication that are used for dis cussing the code related topics They stand in between face to face and e mail communication when it comes to their popularity and spread We introduce them in following list At the end of this section we explain why we favor e mail communication for IDE integration e Design documents provide a high level model of the system and are useful for understanding of the software system and its decomposi
6. built in bookmarks menu which provides another place for developers to check whether some e mails are linked to the entities existing in the files he works on In this subsection we have described a number of features that we imple mented in the current version of REmail We have plans and ideas for future which will be discussed in 5 2 3 3 Implementation of REmail In this section we detail the current implementation of REmail As all the soft ware evolves and we hope REmail to keep evolving the content of this chapter will be probably valid only for the current release 28 3 3 Implementation of REmail 3 3 1 The general structure Sh org eclipse remail m org eclipse remail decorators m org eclipse remail editor org eclipse remail modules org eclipse remail preferences Af org eclipse remail util E org eclipse remail views Figure 3 9 Packages of REmail REmail is implemented in 29 classes split inside 7 packages Important parts of REmail are also metafiles introduced in 3 1 2 in which all the parts of Eclipse that are extended by the plug in are declared and the classes implementing particular extension defined The logical base of the plug in is the implementation of the lightweight link ing methods providing different search strategies This is the practical core of the plug in and it has been implemented in a modular way so that different sources of data could be used for a search As we can see on
7. freenet dev freenet cvs r23351 in trunk freenet mM 07 01 2009 04 44 Daniel Cheng Re freenet dev freenet cvs r24974 trunk freen M 23 05 2009 08 21 Luke771 freenet dev ITA 110n update 090523 mM 06 06 2009 02 15 sich freenet dev French Translation Figure 4 3 Example of filtering e mails posted by version control systems 4 2 2 Selective result removal Even though the cvs messages were removed by filtering we could see that other messages that should be removed are difficult to filter in this way E g the Freenet translation messages in Figure 4 3 Therefore we decided to implement means of selective result removal By toggling the checkbox next to each e mail we can express the lack of interest in it This is done selectively e mail by e mail Because we could often evaluate the importance of an e mail simply by its subject removing irrelevant messages using checkbox is not a time consuming task As expected this feature together with filtering helped to refine a list of e mails that are better suited for content examination 4 2 3 E mail readability At first the text of the e mail under examination was displayed in the E mail content view very simply It was not always easy to find the section of e mail referring to the class For this reason all the classnames are now highlighted in the text of e mail With this it is easier to find and understand the context in which the class was mentioned and whether it is of
8. In the REmail preference page Figure 3 17 you have to select a data source and lightweight e mail to code matching method For the beginner we suggest CamelCase which provided best sets of results when the lightweight methods research was conducted 2 as well as during developing REmail After going through the REmail page either PostgreSQL or MBox pages needs to be configured based on the choice of the mailing list source PSQL setup Should you have decided to take advantage of PostgreSQL you will have to set up a table with the given structure and fill it with the data of your mailing list No automated tool to do that is currently available however we are considering to create it In any PostgreSQL database you can create the table using this the following SQL statement CREATE TABLE mail threadpermalink character varying 255 permalink character varying 255 author character varying 255 40 3 4 Using REmail rawcontent text subject character varying 255 timestamp timestamp without time zone The names of most the attributes are self explanatory Permalink must be unique string identifying the e mail while treadpermalink should only be the same for all e mails inside a single thread If you plan to use dictionary search you also need to create a table with single attribute named word and fill it with words you want to consider for the method However we encourage you to use CamelCase method for
9. REmail with Freenet confirmed the results established by Bacchelli et al for each method We used the CamelCase technique for most of the development and testing time as we found it to be the most useful for our needs 50 4 2 Refining results to obtain relevant information 4 2 Refining results to obtain relevant information 4 2 1 Applying filters Even though the CamelCase method provides results with a reasonable preci sion and recall we also usually obtained a considerable number of e mails that indeed referred to a class in question but are irrelevant in the context of pro gram comprehension In the case of Freenet the vast majority of such messages were automatically generated and sent by the version control system for detail ing commits These e mails include listings of all classes that are part of each commit Short in nature the related commit message is hardly relevant to the listed classes With such e mails a new phenomenon have appeared Even the strict regular expression method returned such e mails as relevant links because classes were listed using their complete path inside project structure which followed the package structure Even though the link is formally correct these e mails are in fact irrelevant an example of this is in Figure 4 2 Author nextgens Date 2008 08 26 13 14 49 0000 Tue 26 Aug 2008 New Revision 22172 Modified trunk freenet src freenet client ArchiveContext java trunk freenet
10. a version of REmail for NetBeans Additionally REmail can currently be used with any programming language that Eclipse supports However since search is always started on classes or packages the linking methods that we use are currently Java and OOP centric Therefore we would like to extend the e mail to code capabilities of REmail to deal with larger variety of source code entities Bibliography 1 G Antoniol G Canfora G Casazza A D Lucia and E Merlo Recovering traceability links between code and documentation IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 28 970 983 2002 A Bacchelli M D Ambros M Lanza and R Robbes Benchmarking lightweight techniques to link e mails and source code In Proceedings of WCRE 2009 16th IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering pp 205 214 IEEE CS Press 2009 2009 A Bacchelli M Lanza and M D Ambros Miler a tool infrastructure to analyze mailing lists In Proceedings of FAMOOSr 2009 3rd International Workshop on FAMIX and Moose in Reengineering 2009 A Bacchelli M Lanza and V Humpa Towards integrating e mail com munication in the ide In Proceedings of SUITE 2010 2nd International Workshop on Search driven Development Users Infrastructure Tools and Evaluation IEEE CS Press 2010 2010 A Bacchelli M Lanza and R Robbes Linking e mails and source code artifacts In Proceedings of ICSE 2010 32nd International Conference on Software Engin
11. also proved as excel lent platform for implementing linking methods since they are mostly based on regular expressions 3 Package Explorer 23 Plug ins 0 DSAGroup java 3 il Sale public class DSAGroup extends CryptoKey i subject freenet dev crypto DSA bugs Actions From sback sba sback it gt freenet clients http staticfiles protected static final int 0_BIT_LENGTH 256 Date Apr 3 2007 12 20 13 pm gt freenet clients http staticfiles t List org freenetproject devl gt gs freenet config v iy fresnat crypt public DSAGroup BigInteger p BigInteger q BigInteger g Hi is p p gt B freenet clients http staticflles private static final long serialVersionUID 1 private final BigInteger p q 9 gt 3 BlockCipher java this q q working on a class test for DSA java as needed for my gt Bayptrormatexception java this g g Google Summer of Code ranking I have found two if p signum 1 q signum 1 g signum 1 more bugs another one is already fixed after nextgens gt CryptoElement java throw new lLegalArgumentException gave me the repos access in the current DSA gt 5 CryptoKeyjava implementation It is unlikely that they compare during the normal usage but since there are no raised gt DHGroup java exceptions I believe they must be fixed private DSAGroup DSAGroup group gt D DiffieHeliman java this p new NativeBiginteger 1 group
12. any use In addition e mails often contain the text of previous messages belonging to the same thread For this reason we have modified the view to display text coming from different messages in color This increased the readability of the e mail 52 4 3 Other Message filtering together with selective removal and possibilities of quickly deciding the relevance of e mails in the text proved to be effective when we were examining classes of Freenet to test the REmail and its usefulness After choosing a class of the interest we were able to rid the results of irrelevant e mails and find potentially useful information in a reasonable time 43 Other Linking the e mails to the source code and retrieving information to help devel oper s program comprehension is the core of REmail s functionality However as we were developing REmail testing it and getting feedback we found it neces sary add more features and functionalities which we have subsequently tested We attempted to obtain source code understanding of several classes when working solely with the editor By toggling the bookmark markers we could see the numbers of all the e mails related to all the classes men tioned in the code Classes with a greater number of linked e mails were discussed more thus were a good candidates for further examination es pecially because the original class of interest was dependent on them e Similarly to the editor improvement the presentat
13. considering making a tool to download and merge the files automatically Miler tool As have been mentioned before we provide a tool to get the mailing list from the markmail org site This tool is based on Miler 3 and we have modified web crawler to store the downloaded mailing list in MBox file which can then be used by the REmail To use Miler tool you must use following syntax java jar miler jar name_of_mailing_list path to store mbox files As first parameter input the name of the mailing list as you see it in the browser s address bar while viewing the main page of the list on markmail org example in Figure 3 19 Cc markmail org browse org freenetproject devl Figure 3 19 Getting a name of mailing list for Miler tool The second parameter should ideally lead to a local folder of your e mail client so that you can use it to manipulate the list REmail contains a feature to remove e mails from the results however for a bigger scale editing of the mail list using an e mail client might be preferable Figure shows how a mailing list that was put inside Thunderbird s Local Folders can be manipulated as any other e mail folder 141f Thunderbird is used to remove unwanted e mails changes to the original MBox file are done after executing command Compact from the folder s context menu 42 3 4 Using REmail We ieee freen E Local Folders Outbox G gt Re fr C
14. crawler 3 into Java This allowed us to modify it so that any markmail org mailing list could be stored into an MBox compatible file We create a file that can subsequently be imported and manipulated by user s e mail client For example in the case of Thunderbird all that is needed is for the file to be stored inside Local Folder directory in Thunderbird s directory structure After the next launch the new e mails will be visible open for manipulation and ready to be utilized 3 2 4 Making it modular We did not decide to switch completely from PSQL source to MBox Instead we wanted to have both implemented together so that they could be both chosen and have the benefits of both of them In the original implementation the ac tual search was implemented together with the UI part of plug in For example a class was invoked as a result of search command it called PSQL search specifi cally and then took care of updating the graphical elements of the plug in Now with adding a new way of searching we had to make the plug in modular and separate the program logic from the user interface This was accomplished by creating a general search interface that is implemented by different classes pro viding the same linking functionality by separate means About this in the next section 3 2 5 Adding features With the MBox search implemented and REmail structure reworked we could focus on improving the functionality of REmail especia
15. developers who also use e mails for communicating By the time of writing this thesis Freenet consisted of over 850 classes and 32 packages and the development mailing list archived more than 20 000 messages For the purpose of exploring Freenet with the assistance of REmail we checked out the source code of Freenet using its git repository and we imported it as a project into an Eclipse workspace http freenetproject org whatis html Instructions at http freenetproject org developer html 47 48 4 1 Choosing a linking method 4 1 Choosing a linking method The most important part of working with REmail is the process of linking the chosen classes or packages to the e mail and then investigating the results Therefore before providing any extra features we first implemented the differ ent linking methods as depicted in Section 2 2 We have implemented such methods gradually and we explored the results step by step First we have experimented with case insensitive and case sensitive linking techniques As we expected see Section 2 2 the case insensitive method pro duced results with high recall and low precision confirming the results reported by Bacchelli et al 2 On the other hand the case sensitive method achieved a higher precision with almost no impact on the recall achieved by the previous method For this reason we removed the case insensitive method from the latest version of REmail thus increasin
16. figure we created the interface MailSearch which defines the methods that need to be implemented by any data source solution Inputs of these methods are given by the particular needs of the linking method In case of simple case sensitive and insensitive searches we need to input a classname while for other methods also complete package name is required The interface MailSearch and its implementations are all part of the modules package This is a completely non Ul package Other packages contain classes manipulating the user interface Almost all of these classes need to have access to the indexed results data so that they can process it and present it in Eclipse Thanks to the way Eclipse invokes classes defined in plugin xml lt extension gt tag relations between UI packages are minimized with the exception of us ing some of the code in org eclipse remail util package which contains generally useful classes The class Search in the root org eclipse remail package performs the search by using one of implementations of the MailView interface according to the 29 3 3 Implementation of REmail lt lt Java Interface gt gt maitsearch org eclipse remail modules org eclipse remall modules caseSensitiveSearch String LinkedList lt Mail gt lt lt Java Class gt gt o caselnsensitiveSearch String LinkedList lt Mail gt MboxSearch strictRegexpSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt E a cai hooseReg
17. keywords generation after se lecting a class or a piece of source code that programmer is interested about We plan to offer mail to class traceability This will give developers an access to source code of classes that are being mentioned inside e mails they are viewing in the moment We intend to add a not intrusive notifier that tracks new e mails about classes in which a developer is interested We tried to extend a standard hover window in the editor to display a preview of search results related to the hovered class Initially we have failed to find how to implement this feature However recently an answer on a forum question we posted introduced a method we could employ When using mbox search module developers have to choose the mbox source file in the preferences This is implemented using a list with the active one on the top Now we want to let the user to link a number of mailing lists to specific projects in workspace The MarkMail tool has to be launched separately to download a mailing list We want to create a preference page where the user can launch that tool and any similar future tools thus merging all the work related to setting up a mailing list in REmail 58 5 2 Future Improvements Other How we previously explained in 3 1 we have chosen Eclipse for implementing REmail The idea of the e mail integration however can be put in practice into virtually any other IDE thus we considering creating
18. mailing lists and how to use the plug in itself 3 4 1 Installation At this time there are two ways if puting REmail into action First is by down loading the source code using the SVN repository at the project page on Google Code x We suggest to use the Subclipse x plug in With Subclipse go to File gt Import select SVN gt Checkout projects from SVN and press next On the next page choose to create a new repository and enter http r email googlecode com svn trunk When asked for login information put r email read only On the last page choose whether you d want to put REmail into the workspace and after that you can checkout the project After these initial steps you can see REmail as a project in a package explorer 38 3 4 Using REmail Check Out As Select the method of check out and the revision to check out 2 Choose how to check out folder trunk Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard Only available when the project file does not exist in the repository Check out as a project in the workspace Figure 3 16 Importing REmail using Subclipse Using this method you need to press run to open second instance of Eclipse in which the plug in will be active This way is good when you are interested in the REmail s implementation or you wish to contribute in it If you wish to use REmail for its main purpose consider using the other install method described later This firs
19. null false freenet client Fai freenet client async SplitFileFetcherSegment onFatalFailure S freenet node SendableGetRequestSender send SendableGetReqll freenet client async ChosenBlock send ChosenBlock java 63 freenet node RequestStarter SenderThread run RequestStartq freenet support PooledExecutor MyThread run PooledExecutor What s worse is doing the samee search again does not retry it just repeats theerror Also when I search for words such as database which have failed in the past it does not retry the fetch for that word it just shows the error again Why isthis Figure 3 23 The E mail content view 3 45 Message Filtering REmail is capable of filtering messages based on the content of Author and Sub ject headers You can set up filters that will apply on all of the results shown in E mails view by adding them on Message Filters preference page Currently REmail looks for a presence of the string in a header to include or exclude the results from the list It is worth noting that all the messages ale always cached when searching Message simply merely determines their presence in the E mail view and the counted hit numbers in Package explorer without removing them from the DB In this way different filters can be switched with no impact on the performances 45 3 4 Using REmail Message Filters Or Dr v E mail result filtering Messages with Subject matching following should be cvs
20. p toByteArray this q new NativeBiginteger 1 group q toByteArray gt Oi MeHelimantightContext jav this g new NativeBigInteger 1 group g toByteArray gt D Digest java gt 5 DSAjava pe public void testSign_border Ea by a comma BigInteger k BigInteger ONE BigInteger q gt D DSAPrivateKeyjava Global DSAgroupBigA getQ add BigInteger ONE SAPublicKey java ad BigInteger p q BigInteger g SASignature java 1p ring am a p add Biginteger ONE The first bug is generated by this code part of DSATEest java not yet committed ummyRandomSource java i DSAGroup aDSAgroup new DSAGroup p q 9 E T EncryptingloAdapter java 7 nn z A pi J Ol gt D EntropySource java D E mails 3 D b 5 Global java Date Subject 8 gt HMAC java gt QpavesHAlieve 2007 03 17 10 47 23 freenet dev freenet cvs r12183 in trunk freenet src freenet client config crypt io io comm io xfer node node fcp support freenet dev crypto DSA bugs 2007 04 07 14 04 02 freenet dev crypto DSA bugs 2007 09 21 05 09 18 freenet dev freenet cvs r15096 branches freenet fk src freenet node 2007 09 21 05 23 34 _ freenet dev freenet cvs r15096 branches freenet jfk src freenet node 2007 09 21 05 30 30 freenet dev freenet cvs r15096 branches freenet jfk src freenet node gt D KeyAgreementSchemeContex gt D PCFBMode java gt RandomSource java gt jj RiindaelPCFBMo
21. source projects In Proceedings of ICSM 2009 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance pages 147 156 2009
22. the development the structure of MarkMail org has changed forcing us to update Miler Also there is no guarantee that MarkMail will continue providing its service in future As introduced on page 41 most of the mailing lists are managed by Mail Man the GNU Mailing List Manager This system usually offers access to e mail archives on the subscription page of a list We plan to create a tool that will download archived e mails merge them together into single mbox file and make them available for REmail 57 5 2 Future Improvements e We also consider adding a new data source module giving more flexibility to the users when working with the mailing list Particularly a support for obtaining e mails stored online via IMAP accounts can be implemented This would remove the dependency on an external e mail client to manip ulate the content of the list Usability features We are considering adding a support for direct management of mailing lists in the Eclipse We would like to allow user to view an entire mailing list not just results of a search and allow reading editing and deleting e mails in it We want to remove the need of an external application for doing this while still having a mbox storage file that can be adressed by other programs Currently REmail allows a developer to work with e mails extensively however passively We plan to implement a support for sending e mails directly from the IDE also with automatic
23. trunk s _ J Down Excluded Messages with Author matching following should be Mathew Toseland Figure 3 24 Filtering out messages 3 4 6 Editor Integration REmail contributes a trigger button onto the main toolbar O amp R S HG By pressing this button you can toggle the bookmark markers in the active editor As you can see in the figure 3 8 a marker will appear on every line which contains a classname that has been submitted to the search By moving mouse over a marker a hover will show you the number of hits the class has with the current filters active In case there are more class entities on the same line just one marker will be shown however the hover will include information about all of the classnames 46 3 4 Using REmail Chapter 4 Case Study During the development of REmail we used Freenet the software system de veloped by the Freenet Project to test the implementation and validate the func tionalities The Freenet Project aims at creating a free software system that lets you anonymously share files chat on forums and browse and publish freesites web sites accessible only through Freenet without fear of censorship Freenet is decentralized to make it less vulnerable to attack and if used in darknet mode where users only connect to their friends is very difficult to detect Freenet is in active development since 1999 is written in Java and has an active community of
24. 6 at 02 35 29PM 0100 Florent Daigni re NextGen wrote Hi I m currently implementing the ConfigToadlet and wondering if the ui should show every possible options or restrict the set to well known Figure 4 1 E mail related to a class retrievable only by the case sensitive method The CamelCase technique deals with this issue in a straightforward way As previously explained Section P 2 such technique offers the best trade off be tween precision and recall while maintaining reasonably high value As de picted in Table 4 1 this method runs the strict regular expression search only on classes named by a single word while it uses the case sensitive approach on class whose name is formed by more than one word In this way it combines best of both techniques By applying the CamelCase technique on Freenet we see a great difference in package results compared to the other methods The package client serves as an example of this The CamelCase technique linked 291 e mails to the client s classes Client contains 37 classes and amongst them only class Metadata is not in CamelCasing Thus for this class the CamelCase applied the strict regular expression method returning only 26 results The case sensitive search on the other hand returns 335 results for this class raising a number of unique e mails linked to all of package classes to 534 All of new e mails are linked only to Metadata and are mostly irrelevant Using
25. Email search command which serves as an initiator of search and is shown in the context right click menu of the Package Explorer Since user can select multiple classes packages or the project itself the task of SelectionProcessor is to produce a list of the actual classes to be submitted to the search Selection Processor then submits the list to the IndexSearch to continue the work IndexSearch Based on the given list of classes to search IndexSearch commits the linking and subsequently indexing process on all of them It depends on List of CompilationUnit instances which in Eclipse represent the java resources or other source file types depending on the Eclipse distribution 31 3 3 Implementation of REmail the remail modules Search class IndexSearch needs to manipulate UI to inform the user about the progress of the search which is the reason why it has been included outside the non Ul modules package Inside IndexSearch we use the Eclipse status bar progressMonitor extension to work with the progress bar that notifies users about proceedings of the search As also stated in previous sections the search results are indexed Indexing is necessary for providing vital functionality to the plug in the Package Explorer decoration or the editor integration Fast displaying of the linking results for previously searched classes is an example of indexing usage Indexing is implemented using a database approach SQLite p
26. author was sometimes useful sorting by time brought related e mails together because similar development issues are discussed in the same period of time 54 4 3 Other Chapter 5 Conclusions 5 1 Summary We have created REmail an Eclipse plugin that integrates e mail communica tion in the IDE We have been motivated by the growing need of improving how developers especially when geographically spread communicate We have fo cused on e mail communication The most common mean of communication for distributed teams and we believe is one of the best suited for integration with the source code REmail incorporates several lightweight techniques to link classes to e mails discussing them We have extended the GUI of Eclipse in a number of ways to allow developers to take advantage of these techniques seamlessly The features we have implemented can be a useful tool for developers trying to comprehend a new software system A developer can choose any of the mail ing lists present in the MarkMail service use the tool we have created to import it and use it with REmail The plug in is implemented in a modular way cur rently allowing programmers to utilize two possible data sources mbox e mail storage file format and PostgreSQL DBMS REmail offers a configuration interface to allow programmers to properly set their preferences The central points of our plugin are the Package Explorer where developers select classes the
27. ch_aos_cal10n announce 6 if reen C com_apple_lists_x11 users 215 6 b Re fr C com_enthought_m pd users 127 Re ME m org_freenetproject_devi 22354 6 gt Re fr C pdigin devel 73 6 Re fr Figure 3 20 Example of manipulating mailing list in Thunderbird When a mailing list s MBox file has been obtained path to it needs to be entered into the MBox preference page Thunderbird Mbox Mbox mail source specific settings Active Mailist MBox file Users vita Library Thunderbird Profiles 40tfoa42 default Mail Local Folders org_freenetproject_devi Users vita Library Thunderbird Profiles 40tfoa42 default Mail Local Folders com_apple_lists_x11 users Users vita Library Thunderbird Profiles 40tfoa42 default Mail Local Folders ch_qos_callOn announce Users vita Library Thunderbird Profiles 40tfoa42 default Mail Local Folders pdigin devel Remove Up Figure 3 21 MBox location preference page Such page contains a path editor in which multiple mailing lists can be stored A file on top of the list is the one that is active for the search It means that when switching to another project you have to move appropriate list to the top This is caused by implementational limitation of preferences and is likely to be changed 3 4 3 Searching After REmail has been set up the next step is to proceed with the linking process on classes that one is interested in The package explorer is an entry point f
28. cided to search for a different method of editor integration Side bar ruler markers Markers point out general point of interest in any of the resource files Known markers present in Eclipse are problem markers warn ing markers to do markers and breakpoint markers all of which appear when necessary on the left side of editor 27 3 3 Implementation of REmail 5 if CARCHIVE_TYPE ZIP a Y handleZIPArchive ctx else ifCARCHIVE_TYPE TAR handleTARArchive ctx else fl throw new ArchiveFai catch IOException ioe l throw new ArchiveFailure finally Closer close Cis ll Multiple markers at this line r ArchiveExtractCallback 10 emails found ArchiveRestartException 3 emails found ClientContext 36 emails found ArchiveFailureException 7 emails found ArchiveStoreContext 23 emails found MINOR Assumes the fi TarEntry entry o byte buf new byte 32 HashSet lt String gt names ll boolean gotMetadata fa outerTAR whileCtrue entry tarIS getNex ifCentry null br Figure 3 8 Using markers There is also a bookmark marker that allows developers to point out places of interest of their own We have used these markers to provide information about all the classnames visible in the editor s source code to which some e mails have been linked Their appearance can be triggered by a toolbar button so that user can decide whether to show them All can also be browsed in the
29. d been indexed If so Mail View shall give this ICompilationUnit to a new instance of SQLiteMailListCon structor in the org eclipse remail util package to produce a LinkedList lt Mail gt from the cache After that this list is put as an input MailContent View MailContentView implements the E mail content view This view simply shows the contents of the e mail chosen in the E mails view It is plugged into Eclipse the same way as previous view by being defined in the plugin xml It also uses one widget that fills entire view That is a Browser widget which is a part of SWT This widget can display any html formatted content The e mail to display in the view is set up using the setMail method which takes a Mail object as an argument The view displays the e mail in an user friendly way taking advantage of the stylesheet support A class ContentDecorator in the util package has been created for that purpose 3 3 5 Editor integration As introduced in the evolution Section 3 2 REmail integrates itself into the gen eral Eclipse source code editor by giving possibility to show markers for lines that contain a name of class that has been searched for before The org eclipse remail editor package contains the implementation Package 36 3 3 Implementation of REmail contains two classes of which markerInitActionDelegate is the implementation of marker extension The other class MailHover is an attempted implementation of a Java
30. d let the user select a class in that environment conduct a search based on the preferred linking technique show the results and let the user read selected e mails in a convenient way The project started as a part of Software Design and Evolution at University of Lugano Initially a deliverable as a part of SDE project had to be negotiated At that point the looks and inner workings of REmail started to take shape First of all Eclipse was chosen as an IDE to put REmail into Not only because of its structure and available documentation as several members of REVEAL research group had positive experience extending Eclipse notably in case of the Syd project 3 2 1 Early stages The main goal of the first phase of REmail development has been to implement the lightweight linking techniques and if possible present them in extended user interface of Eclipse This was done and a basic version of REmail was imple mented see Figure 3 3 As a part of their research Bacchelli et al created a crawler based on Miler 3 capable of fetching a mailing list of any project present on markmail org into a PostgreSQL database Some of the mailing list were already present in that http syde inf usi ch 5A free service archiving mailing lists of various open source projects 19 3 2 The evolution of REmail form therefore we decided to use PostgreSQL as a means of e mail storage for the plug in As a well established database system PSQL
31. de java a Figure 3 3 Initial implementation of REmail In first version of REmail the search was fully connected to the actual UI of the plug in and coded together SQL SELECT statements were used to obtain data using regular expression support of PSQL and a proper JDBC driver This version did not have any preferences implemented yet and every setting was hardcoded Developer could select a single class in the package explorer and select RE mail search from the context menu showed at I The results of the linking were displayed in the table II and after selecting a message its text appeared in a browser shown at III This layout proved to be effective and with many addi tions to the UI usability and functionality is still a basic preferred layout in the current implementation 3 2 2 Switching to MBox Using PostgreSQL proved to be fast and easy to implement but it is not without drawbacks First of all an instance of PSQL server has to be ran for the plug in 20 3 2 The evolution of REmail That might be useful in some cases as it enables multiple developers to work simultaneously with a single DB For example we can imagine employees in a company setting up a single server for all interested members of the team Another advantage of this centralization is that when removing ill linked e mails from the database by one developer these e mails will no longer show up for also the others On the other hand this c
32. doc hover extension that currently is under construction explained in 3 2 5 The markerInitActionDelegate is registered in plugin xml as an action class for pressing of the button in the main toolbar It implements interface IEditorAction Delegate which defines a run method to be ran on action activation From this method we can obtain the text of the active editor The document is searched for known i e indexed classnames In case of a hit a Bookmark marker is added to the Eclipse environment After the scan of the document is complete Eclipse platform shows all the markers at the proper line on the left side of the editor automatically 3 3 6 Preferences Several preference pages had been included into the Eclipse general preferences Extension org eclipse ui preferencePages is used to insert the preference page All of them are put into the single REmail preference category org eclipse remail preferences lt lt Java Class gt gt lt lt Java Class gt gt 5 PreferencePane org eciipse remail preferen lt lt Java Class gt gt lt lt Java Class gt gt cePaneMbox O PreferencePanePostgre org eclipse remail preferences y org eclipse remail preferences clava Clase gt gt lt lt Java Class gt gt PE PreterencePancFilters gt FiterListEditor Ai n F eclipse remail preferences org eclipse remail preferences org eclipse remail preferences Figure 3 15 Classes in org eclipse remail packag
33. e As seen on class diagram since all the preference pages and classes implementing them are defined separately in the plugin xml there is no need for any relation or dependency among the classes realizing different pages All of them implement interface FieldEditorPreferencePage which allowed us to use 37 3 4 Using REmail many common types of widgets to create preferences Eclipse had already con tained classes to create simple line editor combo or radio button preferences These basic pre programmed widgets were useful to create most of the pref erences needed with two exceptions e We had to create our own editor for entering message filters We have extended the JFace ListEditor to provide this component The ListEditor Add button was extended to show an input dialog in which developer can type in the filter and also actions on pressing OK and Apply but tons were changed to provide immediate change of the Package Explorer number decoration e We needed to have an editor to allow the user to select and store mul tiple files for the management of MBox files storing different mailing lists Similar editor for managing directories already exists however we couldn t use or extend it Therefore we have employed ListEditor and ex tended it to provide file choosing and storing functionality 3 4 Using REmail This section serves as an User manual with instruction on how to setup REmail how to obtain
34. e Ah A EOS BO 15 3 2 Eclipse as a collection of plug ins 113 16 3 3 Initial implementation of REmail 19 3 4 Initial way of conducting search o o o 23 3 5 Search process progress Dal o o ooo ooo o 24 3 6 E mail view using tree viewer o ooo oo 25 3 7 Marking threaded conversation in the text of e mail 26 A 27 3 9 Packages of REmaill 28 sawe 29 3 11 Processing of the indexed search o o o 30 3 12 SQLite DB structure for search results indexing 31 A 34 OT 34 ere core eer 36 A ee eek 38 ade tds 39 A AE 40 3 19 Getting a name of mailing list for Miler tool 41 3 20 Example of manipulating mailing list in Thunderbird 42 E e a rd de AS 42 3 22 Starting EE oo a AAA E 43 He Pare a es 44 3 24 Filtering out Messages o ooo eee eee eee 45 4 1 E mail related to a class retrievable only by the case sensitive A O ee 49 4 2 Related however irrelevant e mail linked by Strict technique 50 ix Figures 4 3 Example of filtering e mails posted by version control systems 51 Chapter 1 Introduction Nowadays when creating a software system developers spend a significant amount of time inside an Integrated Development Environment IDE Unless they work on a small project of their own developers are often part of a team
35. e and tree viewers together using a view that brings columns into a tree structure thus providing a better visual presentation One of the latest additions at the time of writing this thesis is making it possible for the users to mark emails that are of little or no importance to the class in the question For this we modified the viewer to display a checkbox that allows the user to express lack of interest in particular e mail or thread E mail content view In REmail using E mail content view you can read the text of any linked e mail At first we used the html component of SWT and simply inputed the text of the email inside III in Figure 3 3 This only provided a better text rendering However we also felt the need to highlight the name of the linked class During the usage the linked class was often only mentioned as a part of a dump of paths or changes in commits thus it was difficult to spot With the classname highlighted a user can quickly see whether this email is relevant Another issue to readability of the e mail is the presence of text from previous messages in the thread In our test case on Freenet this was actually the case for the vast majority of the results The standard way of highlighting the previous RE messages is by putting a number of gt symbols at the beginning of each line In the E mail content view though as text is usually getting wrapped this was not easy to comprehend visually 26 3 2 The e
36. e collected from experimenting on sample mailing lists more complex approaches were devised Finally a number of lightweight matching methods were devised 2 each one giving results with various accu racy Such lightweight methods have been implemented in REmail giving it its core functionality These are the six methods currently implemented by REmail among which developer can choose 1 Class name case insensitive Usually when being referred to in e mails 2 2 E mail to code linking techniques classes are simply mentioned by their names Thus the first method sim ply searches for the classname inside the text of e mails Developers don t always write with proper capitalization so this method is not case sensi tive Also classnames can appear at the end of sentences followed by or they can be put inside quotes therefore no restrictions were imposed on the characters surrounding them 2 Class name case sensitive Results of search using previous method have a reasonably high recal value however the precisior is low Since it is a common practice to name classes in a way known as CamelCasing the second method utilize case sensitivity to improve precision 3 Strict regular expression case insensitive Results of case sensitive search are considerably more precise than in the first approach however still about one third of relevant e mails are recovered in average A com plex strict regular expre
37. e in precision and recall Case sensitive method has a high recall value and low precision while Strict regular expression approach gives opposite results Idea came to combine the two trying to get the best of both meth ods It was presumed that the small precision of the simple name matching method is caused by worlds that are classnames but that also exist in standard natural language e g names like Bookmark or Cookie Strings like ConfigToadlet are not a part of that thus are likely to be classnames when referred to Therefore in this combined method English dictionary is queried for the classname If the string is present in dictionary the Strict regular expression method is applied otherwise the case sensitive search is conducted Mixed using CamelCase case sensitive Technique using dictionary provided results with both precision and recall above fifty percent How ever inspecting a dictionary is time consuming thus the idea to use Camel Casing instead of dictionary was devised When the string in hand is in CamelCase e g MailView or SelectionProcessor simple case sensitive search is run while otherwise e g Bookmark Cookie Strict regular ex pression matching is conducted While having the same recall as the pre vious this method had actually increased precision by few percent while being considerably faster and less memory dependent Out of all these methods it would seem that the CameCase search is the be
38. eering to be published 2010 M Fischer M Pinzger and H Gall Populating a release history database from version control and bug tracking systems In Proceedings of ICSM 2003 19th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance pages 23 32 2003 E Gamma and K Beck Contributing to Eclipse Principles Patterns and Plug Ins Addison Wesley 2003 59 60 Bibliography 8 11 12 A J Ko R DeLine and G Venolia Information needs in collocated soft ware development teams In Proceedings of ICSE 2007 29th ACM IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering pages 344 353 2007 T D LaToza G Venolia and R DeLine Maintaining mental models a study of developer work habits In Proceedings of ICSE 2006 28th ACM International Conference on Software Engineering pages 492 501 2006 G C Murphy D Notkin and K J Sullivan Software reflexion models Bridging the gap between design and implementation IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 27 364 380 2001 Web page Network Working Group Internet message format http tools ietf org html rfc5322 October 2008 Web page Tom Jewett Design pattern many to many http www tomjewett com dbdesign dbdesign php page manymany php Eclipse Building Commercial Quality Plug Ins E Clayberg and D Rubel Addison Wesley 2 edition 2006 E Shihab Z M Jiang and A E Hassan Studying the use of developer irc meetings in open
39. ere actual SQL language is used ResultSet rs stmt executeQuery SELECT FROM mail WHERE rawcontent s restOfPackage 2 V I A Z S packageLastPart classname java class s order by timestamp Methods of PostgreCore initiate SQL queries and put results into the list of Mail objects to use SQL queries contain regular expressions designed on the theoretical description of the lightweight linking methods 2 An example of using SELECT statement to get results by Strict regular expression method is provided above The parameters needs to be inputed from java variables and the whole statement must be escaped We give an actual usage as in the code as an example instead of plain SQL statement As we use SQL and database in the PSQL module it should not be confused with SQLite DB usage for preserving results SQLite serves as REmail s inter nal data storage tool while PSQL serves as an source of original data When MBox search is selected in the preferences REmail does not maintain any ac tual database connection Description of setting up the PSQL and the necessary structure of the data table are provided in next section 33 3 3 Implementation of REmail MBox Another implementation of the MailSearch interface provides MBox data source Class structure of this implementation is the same as in the case of PSQL core this can be seen in class diagram 3 10 MboxSea
40. escribe the evolution of the project as well as its current implementation and we provide instructions on how to 3 1 2 Structure of the Document work with it In Chapter 4 we present a use case based on the experience of using REmail on the Freenet project during the creation of REmail In Chapter 5 we conclude the thesis summarize its results and discuss possi bilities of future improvements 1 2 Structure of the Document Chapter 2 Background research Purpose of this chapter is to introduce the research that led to creation of REmail Topics presented in both sections of this chapter form a base from which came the idea of REmail In the Section 2 1 we discuss inter developer commu nication relations and rationalize benefits of REmail 4 while in the Section 2 2 we present techniques that form logical core of the plug in 2 2 1 Communication between developers Especially when working in a distributed development team such as open source projects developers of software systems have to communicate about the project they are building They use various means of communication to do so Posting e mails into mailing lists is by far the most spread way of commu nicating about development In open source environment nevertheless face to face consultations remain the most popular in collocated teams 9 Face to face meetings are considered the most effective form of communica tion among collocated developers 4
41. esults of the linking pro cess The view is defined in plugin xml and is implemented in MailView class MailView extends Eclipse s abstract class ViewPart mandatory for any view Method CreatePartControl is also obligatory and serves as a point of initiating the UI parts of the view 34 3 3 Implementation of REmail org eclipse remail views lt lt Java Class gt gt lt lt Java Class gt gt 5 MailTreeContentProvider org eciipse remail views O getElements Odject Object createPartControl Composite voi gt createPartControl Composite voi getChildren Object Object O setMail Mail void processSelection IWorkbenchPar Selection vo getParent Object Objec hasChildren Object boolear mailContentView O checkStateCh isGrayed Object boolear anged CheckStateChangedEvent v getColumnimage Object int Imag getColumnText Object int String Figure 3 13 REmail s implementation of views MailView uses a single control an instance of JFace ContainerCheckedTree Viewer that completely fills the view This allows to create a combined table tree element the best solution for presenting search results of the REmail In addi tion in the beginning of every row it also provides a checkbox which we used to create the irrelevant e mail removal feature MailView is a the largest class of REmail as all the presenting of results is implemented in it Four subclasses are neces
42. expSearchiString String LinkedListeMai gt A maillist LinkedList lt Mail gt me gt r a i dictionarySearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt amp MooxSearch camelCaseSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt camelCaseSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt dictionarySearch String String LinkedList lt Mai gt O lboseRegexpSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt strciRegexpSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt caselnsensitiveSearch String LinkedList lt Mail gt caseSensitiveSearch String LinkedList lt Mail gt amp PostgreSearch String String String caselnsensitiveSearch String LinkedList lt Mail gt caseSensitiveSearch String LinkedList lt Mail gt striciRegexpSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt boseRegexpSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt dictionarySearch String String LinkedList lt Mai gt camelCaseSearch String String LinkedList lt Mail gt Figure 3 10 Interface based modularity of data source implementations current preferences settings The class Search is the only class to directly call the MailSearch interface It ensures execution of linking procedures between a single source code element a class and a mailing list of choice The list of Mail instances is returned to be employed when necessary org eclipse remail Mail is a data class that serves as a central representation of a sin
43. g the ease of use of the tool Classes that have a common dictionary word as their name e g the classes Metadata or Global are the most problematic for the case sensitive method In Table we summarize the numbers resulting by linking several classes of Freenet with the linking methods implemented For the case sensitive match we see that classes with common words as names have significantly more links than those whose names are in CamelCasing Such additional links are often unrelated to the chosen classes class case sensitive strict r exp loose r exp CamelCase Metadata 335 26 26 26 Global 104 1 1 1 Yarrow 61 11 12 11 ConfigToadlet 54 6 8 54 ArchiveManager 43 35 35 43 Table 4 1 Numbers of results of linking different classes with various techniques Strict and loose regular expression methods provide less links for single word classes practically all of them correct These methods on the other hand can be to be too strict for classes in CamelCasing Since such classes are very often just mentioned by their names without parts of package or file extension they were not registered by the Strict and loose regular expression methods Thus impor tant information can be lost Figure 4 1 presents an example of an important 49 4 1 Choosing a linking method e mail not retrieved with such methods Umm Option s already have an is expert setting On Fri Mar 10 200
44. gle e mail throughout all REmail In addition to simply containing necessary attributes subject author text it provides utility methods for merging lists of Mail objects etc Mail also implements the interface Comparable which allows collections of Mail objects to be sorted by the timestamp of an e mail 30 3 3 Implementation of REmail 3 3 2 Result indexing In addition to the Mail and Search classes SelectionProcessor and IndexSearch are also parts of the root org eclipse remail package lt lt Java Class gt gt SelectionProcessor org eclipse remail A store IPreferenceSton execute ExecutionEvent Obje launchSearch IStructuredSelection vo E packageSearch PackageFragment LinkedList lt ICompilationUnit gt projeciSearch IJavaProject LinkedList lt ICompilationUnit lt lt Java Class gt gt 5 IndexSearch org eclipse remail g e search MailSearch amp IndexSearch LinkedList lt ICompilationUnit gt IProgressMon POES IT ALAFEN prepareSQLite voic MN bull Execute String String Boolean LinkedListeMai E searchCompilationUnit ICompilationUnit void e etView String IViewParl m saveResults String String LinkedList lt Mail gt voic da s inkedList lt Mait LinkedList lt Mad gt mni void uodateMaiViewfLinkedList lt Mait gt void Figure 3 11 Processing of the indexed search SelectionProcessor This class is listed inside plugin xml as a handler for the R
45. hat has been discussed at some point In addition e mails offer the additional information stored in the headers defined by the RFC5322 11 message format and when used in context of mailing list thread information is also available Such infor mation helps the effort of code to mail linking that can be done using techniques presented in section 2 2 Finally the code to e mail linking can be used to study a project evolution This is useful when attempting to reverse engineer a system with the goal of understanding its parts by usually new developers tasked to add new features or fix bugs For all these reasons we consider e mails as one of the best candidates to improve the communication between developers Our goal is to support in a seamless way e mail communication within the IDE We are in process of ac complishing this by creating REmail 2 2 E mail to code linking techniques Since 2009 Bacchelli et al have been carrying out research aiming at devising methods of linking different entities of source code to e mails that refer to them 5 Bacchelli et al have experimented with a variety of different methods to do so The goal is devising lightweight approaches which could be applied on a great number of e mails in a reasonable amount of time that is in seconds They achieved that criteria using regular expressions Bacchelli et al began with simple intuitive techniques e g simple classname search and as results wer
46. implemented in the REmail works with general MBox format without any dependence on a particular client 3 2 3 Threads of e mails In mailing lists e mails are usually organized into threads Some of the e mails are standalone mostly announces but whenever there is a reply on some topic that starts a discussion subsequent e mails are handled in threads by e mail clients We needed to implement such feature into REmail as well to provide necessary orientation between results of the search At same time we wanted to provide an automated tool that would be able fetch a complete desired mailing list of project for the user We presume that developer often does not actually have to be subscribed to the mailing list himself Additionally if he is subscribed there is no common method of getting e mails that were posted to the mailing 7MBox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of electronic mail messages All messages in an MBox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file The beginning of each message is indicated by a line whose first five characters consist of From followed by a space and the return path e mail address A blank line is appended to the end of each message Wikipedia 05 2010 22 3 2 The evolution of REmail list before his subscription We have devised a way to take care of both of these needs in the same time We re wrote the original Miler based web
47. ion of number of links per each class and package in Package Explorer allowed us to quickly pass through packages and see the most discussed classes thus the most impor tant or problematic However mostly when not using CamelCase linking technique we discovered that we needed to be careful as certain classes had a greater number of hits but were mostly unrelated because of their names are dictionary words e At the beginning the retrieved e mails were presented on a single list While inspecting the search results we found that most of the e mails were containing bodies of other e mails in the list These messages were originally parts of the same thread Therefore we have modified both source modules to obtain thread related information as well This allowed us to create a threaded result presentation When investigating threads we were mostly examining only the most recent message as it usually con tains parts of the other e mails providing a entire thread s discussion at one location This generally speeded entire process of result inspection 53 4 3 Other e Initially the Mail view was implemented as a simple table that could be sorted by it s columns Because of the combined table tree viewer that we had to use when we introduced threads and the temporal nature of e mail succession all the e mails are sorted only by time This took away a possibility of sorting e mails by the subject and author While sorting by
48. its simplicity and better performance type filter text PostgreSQL Py apy v gt General gt Ant Mbox mail source specific settings gt Help Server 192 0 0 1 gt Install Update Java Port 1486 ObjectAid Class Diagram gt Plug in Development Password soe Y REmail Message Filters ae rernall PostgreSQL Table mails Thunderbird Mbox e gt Run Debug Dictionary table dict Syde A bre Y Restore Defaults Apply Figure 3 18 PostgreSQL preference page To setup REmail to work with PSQL fill in the information on PostgreSQL preference page Figure 3 18 All fields are mandatory except for the Dictio nary table which must be filled only if you plan to use the Dictionary matching linking method MBox setup When using the MBox source of mailing list first you need to get a MBox file There is a number of possibilities for achieving this For example you can down 41 3 4 Using REmail load it from official archives of the mailing list or you can take advantage of the tool we provide Mailman Most of mailing lists of open source projects use Mailman as a list management system If that is the case you can often find archives on the webpage of the list One drawback of this is that they are usually split by month into separate files However as they are already in MBox format they can simply be joined together to provide a single MBox file Currently we are
49. java y VO Vo uv viv vvvvvYYYYY Figure 3 22 Starting search To show results for any class you simply select it in the Package explorer The E mail view will be automatically open the first time after installation of REmail The standard location is at the bottom dock but you can change the position You can browse the results in such a view and if you find any single e mail or an entire thread unwanted you can uncheck it using the checkbox In this 44 3 4 Using REmail way you can express lack of interest any the e mail or thread As you can see in the Figure 3 14 most of the relevant data are shown al ready in the E mail view itself However if you stumble across an interesting result you will most likely be interested in the message text itself That is the purpose of E mail content view fig 3 23 Double clicking any result in the E mail view will display its full content there Every message is displayed with header on top and with the classname of interest highlighted in red Parts of the text from other messages in the thread are indented and printed in different colors BE Outline Subject Re freenet dev UI glitch in XMLLibrarian From Matthew Toseland Date 08 08 2009 09 32 On Saturday 08 August 2009 17 27 25 Matthew Toseland wrote Searching gives a stack trace on the UI We should handle this better it sjust a DNF ADNF FetchException Splitfileerror null 1
50. lated issues however needs arise to communicate about specific and complex issues In that case use of internet telephony and recently also audio video transfers saves time This method of communication is inherently close to face to face meeting and brings its advantages and issues with it Notably as conversations are usually not being recorded linking them to source code artifacts is not possible Developers reported that responses to questions sent by e mail can take hours or even days be received Original questions are often misunderstood by read ers who do not provide correct answer to the matter at hand And developers generally consider writing e mails to be tiresome 9 These problems are also common in other communication means especially in design documents issue reports and partially in IM However e mails offer advantages that make them a preferred method for inter developer communica tion First of all e mails are used to discuss issues about any level of abstraction from low level implementation details up to high level design decisions They can be written by anybody who has subscribed into a mailing list not just by developers themselves which is a problem especially with code and commit comments but also by beta testers and consequentially end users of the sys tem 3E g Skype and Google Talk 9 2 2 E mail to code linking techniques Therefore we can often link e mails to any source code entity t
51. lly the usability Preferences First of all a preference panel had to be built We have added a set of properties panes into Eclipse s Preferences necessary to setup all aspects of the plug in Notably log in information for PSQL locations of MBox source files for projects 23 3 2 The evolution of REmail selection of the e mail source and the choice of a lightweight linking method to use We have also decided to implement message filtering that would give developer a way of refining search results Initially the only way to conduct a search was by clicking on the classname in Package Explorer Figure 3 4 and selecting a method of search This had to be done for every class individually In current implementation method selection has a general setting inside preferences gt D DSAjava do z Debug As DSAGroup java validate h string where p q and g DSAPrivateKeyjay Team lt COS DSAPublicKey java Compare With DSASignature javq Replace With se String grp 0 P Restore from Local History pw StringTokenizer grp E mail Recommender Class Name Case Insensitive Class Name Case Sensitive 3 Strict Regular Exp j Global java Loose Regular Exp HMAC java Dictionary Search JavaSHA1 java 3 CamelCase Search B DummyRandomSd o D D a a D EncryptingloAdap J EntropySource ja Figure 3 4 Initial way of conducting search Result indexing In the first implementation a search was conducted at
52. on In contrast to already existing PSQL search implementation this solution would only give benefit in better e mail management for the user The biggest drawback is that this solution would be bound only to Thunderbird client While this can be non problematic for many developers others use different clients with old mailing list content already loaded into them In addition we had Shttp www mozillamessaging com thunderbird 21 3 2 The evolution of REmail difficulties implementing Thunderbird plug in according to our needs so we decided not to follow this course of action Accessing MBox data The second approach which we actually implemented is to get e mail data directly from the filesystem Thunderbird uses a MBox format to store e mail data All the messages from single Thunderbird folder e g inbox or sent are stored as a plain text in a single file They are basically stored in their original format similar to RFC822 x Any additions by the email client are added as a header starting with X e g X Mozilla If the user imports an entire mailing list into a single folder in Thunderbird separated from other emails all such e mails can then be accessed by RE mail in the corresponding file Notably this format is used by many other clients like KMail the Mac OS X Mail application Eudora etc This gives the devel oper a broader choice on the e mail client The search module for MBox we have
53. or all the search You can select any combination of classes and packages or you can select the project itself 43 3 4 Using REmail When invoking the context menu on this selection you ll see REmail search command that if clicked will initiate the search see figure 3 22 While searching as the results are getting indexed a progress bar figure at the bottom of the window will give feedback about the progress of the linking process When the search is completed the number of hits given by the selected linking method will appear next to classnames and packages in the Package Explorer 3 4 4 Browsing e mails v f i freenet clients http bookmark 47 il A Bookmark java New gt J BookmarkCateg J Bookmarkitem j Open BookmarkMana Show In freenet clients httg J BMPFilter java y J CharsetExtracte 0 3 2 CommentExcep Ea Copy Qualifie D ContentDatariit Paste D ContentFilter ja 3 Delete Build Path J DataFilterExcep Source P Elementinfo jav Refactor D FilterCallback ja v Mvvvvvagyy viv J FilterUtils java a Import 3 FoundURICallba x Export P GenericReadFilt 7 ports eure oleae Assign Working J KnownUnsafeCe RUNAS T MIMEType java P NullFilterCallba Debug As D PNGFilter java Validate P UndetectableCh Team P UnknownChars Compare With T UnknownConter Replace With Z UnsafeContenti Restore from Lo 2 Unsupported CH Ta PT ES tea D Yytoken
54. osition of the system In practice however they are mostly used to inform about fixes or they are sketchy reports of new features and are very short Because they are attached to code updates it is not possible to reply on them and therefore start a discussion In practice this is often overcome as modern version control systems post commit messages into mailing lists Actually this has further repercussions in usage of REmail more in Chapter 4 e Issue reports and bug tracking system are nowadays necessary parts of any software project They allow for filing textual reports containing useful information related to the source code The spectrum of this information is quite broad since issue reports are not only filled by developers but also by other interested groups notably beta testers and users In modern bug tracking and project administering systemg these reports can be commented and replied to in threaded way Links between these reports and source code could be established by using heuristic and pattern matching methods similar to those introduced in the next section 6 However the communication in bug reports is focused on the issue itself and it hardly crosses these borders It is uncommon to find high level concerns or design rationale discussed in this media 4 As a confirmation about the reduced focus of bug reports new developers are commonly employed to work on bug fixing as it requires less high level archi
55. ould be dangerous too since not just ill linked e mails can be removed what is uninteresting for one developer might be important for others working on different parts of the system However we want REmail to be also useful for single developers trying to understand or develop existing system Therefore we were looking for an in tegrated solution that would not require an external software to be ran other than Eclipse Since we are working with e mails we thought about taking advantage of an established e mail client Thunderbird is widely spread e mail client both in in dustrial and open source environment thus we started exploring the possibility of using it as the source of e mails Any developer subscribed to a mailing list in question would have e mails of the list stored in Thunderbird for REmail to utilize We thought about a non invasive of searching through the emails two possibilities came into our attention A plug in for Thunderbird Idea is to create a separate plug in for Thunderbird that would feed data to REmail In that way both Eclipse and Thunderbird would have to be running simultaneously The actual search would be done by Thunderbird extension that would then feed the results to Eclipse We wanted to use Unix sockets as channels for the interprocess communication In this way the possibility of Thunderbird running on different machine was open giving the green light to centralization like in the PSQL soluti
56. rch prepares the input vari ables for the search which is done using MboxCore class However differently from the PostgreCore MboxCore does not do the com plete search It merely provides for case insensitive method which is basically just matching a name of the class in question All the results of case insensitive search are always a superset of the results of any other method MboxSearch uses Java s regular expressions to get a subset of the raw results using a chosen method The reason of this is for obtaining better performances For example imagine that we search through mailing list of 25000 e mails and the average number of results is around 30 using CamelCase method Having to apply regu lar expression on all the e mails takes a considerable amount of time more then just searching for a single classname Applying the regular expressions on the resulting 30 e mails is orders of magnitude faster MboxCore accesses the location of the MBox file of the current mailing list from the plug in s preferences storage Its methods then pass through the file in search of the classname If there is a match in the text of any scaned e mail it retrieves the headers and stores a Mail object in the list 3 3 4 Views Realizations of both views of REmail are placed in the org eclipse remail views package Both are completely Ul centric as they must present the search results MailView The E mails view is the main point of presenting the r
57. rogrammers use applications that are external to the IDE to handle the content of mailing lists No matter how related these e mails are to software development these are completely disconnected from the IDE Such situation forces developers to interrupt the programming flow in the IDE whenever they need to operate with them As there are no means of linking the contents of e mails to the source code entities they refer to important information gets lost with time 1 1 Goal of this project Currently Bacchelli et al are conducting a research that aims at devising lightweight methods to recover the traceability link between source code ar tifacts and e mails 5 Finding e mails that are actually relevant to code entities is not trivial mostly due to complicated nature of informal human com munication Bacchelli et al provided a number of source to e mail linking meth ods based on regular expressions thus lightweight providing different levels of precision and recall The goal of our project is to create REmail a plug in which integrates e mail communication into the Eclipse IDE It enables developers by taking ad vantage of these lightweight methods to exploit the information that can be obtained by the process of linking the e mails with code entities 1 2 Structure of the Document In Chapter 2 we discuss in detail the underlying research that led to REmail We also analyze related work In Chapter 3 we introduce REmail We d
58. rovides a JDBC driver which allows us to work with structured data using SQL language in the same way as with most of the database management systems Difference is that SQLite does not run as a server and no actual connection is needed Instead SQLite is basically a library that lets us store data in a single file in a transparent way ID lt PK gt permalink lt PK gt subject date author threadlink text Hits visible bool Classes ID Emails permalink name path package Figure 3 12 SQLite DB structure for search results indexing To implement the indexing we use three tables that employ the typical many to many N M approach known from the relation databases theory 12 As shown in the entity relationship diagram on figure 3 12 this is implemented us ing two data tables classes and mails which use a third table hits to provide N M relations 32 3 3 Implementation of REmail 3 3 3 Source formats As explained previously REmail s modular structure allows for any number of different searching techniques to be implemented Currently two data sources and the related techniques are implemented for searching as shown in figure 3 10 PostgreSQL For the PostgreSQL search class PostgreSearch implements the MailSearch in terface This class channels the results of the search from the PostgreCore class that is actually conducting the search As we use JDBC driver to access PSQL database PostgreCore is wh
59. run time taking a few seconds to produce results This was hardly an optimal solution so we devised an indexing process Utilizing SQLite JDBC driver we have developed a database based indexing of search When a search is conducted on any class the results are stored into the small SQLite databases By the next time just selecting a class in Package explorer shows the outcome of the last search instantly A new search would updat the indexed data 8When working with Freenet development mailing list with around 22000 e mails http www zentus com sqlitejdbe 24 3 2 The evolution of REmail Package Explorer Together with indexing came ideas of substantially changing the way the search is conducted and the results presented inside the Package Explorer Foremost now it is possible to make a search on multiple classes packages or even an entire project By selecting multiple classes user can start the linking process and index the data for all of them Similarly a developer can select a set of packages in which case the search will be done on all classes included By running the process on the root of the project all the classes are linked with e mails and results stored in the SQLite database file Besides that we have devised a decoration of Package Explorer entities to notify the user if a particular entity has been searched for We show a number of hits each entity has within the mailing list In the case of a class
60. s like those centered on 13 14 3 1 Eclipse C C were put out of consideration Since we wanted to build a plug in we were also looking for an environment with a good modular structure NetBeang and Eclipse Java based develop ment platforms that also allow programming in other languages thus came into consideration Eclipse is currently the most widely used IDE in the open source community and also provides a considerable amount of documentation and tools for plug in development Having a reasonable modular structure we have decided to build REmail as a plug in of Eclipse We are also considering creating a version of REmail for an alternative IDE especially NetBeans 3 1 1 Structure The main part of Eclipse for both user interaction and plug in development is workbench the main window that always has one of the perspectives active By perspective we mean the setting that decides how the important parts of work bench are spread over the window Plug ins can access active editors and views through the workbench and also open and manipulate their own 13 The workbench contains two main types of windows placed into subcontain ers that most UI contributing plug ins work with views and editors Views such as Package Explorer or Mail View and Main Content View in RE mail allow plug ins to display or edit important information The information is commonly viewed using one of the JFac controls based on tree li
61. s are used 16 3 1 Eclipse gt Favorites Plug in A gt MANIFEST MF th favorkes jar RG oe A MANIFEST MF h jdt jar i A z N k o e Plug in Se so 3 A j r A A Pa Y ry ui jar Plug in Loader ih Java Class Library Java Virtual Machine Operating System D MANIFEST MF Th resources jar 4g MANIFEST MF Figure 3 2 Eclipse as a collection of plug ins by the plug in what extension points are needed and what other points are defined The following is the MANIFEST MF of REmail Especially Require Bundle is needed to tell Eclipse the basic plug ins required by REmail Manifest Version 1 0 Bundle ManifestVersion 2 Bundle Name REmail Bundle SymbolicName org eclipse remail singleton true Bundle Version 1 0 0 qualifier Bundle Activator org eclipse remail Activator Require Bundle org eclipse ui org eclipse core runtime org eclipse jdt core bundle version 3 5 1 org eclipse core resources bundle version 3 5 1 org eclipse j face text bundle version 3 5 1 org eclipse ui ide bundle version 3 5 1 17 3 1 Eclipse org eclipse ui editors bundle version 3 5 0 org eclipse jdt ui Bundle ActivationPolicy lazy Bundle RequiredExecutionEnvironment JavaSE 1 6 Bundle ClassPath lib postgresql 8 4 701 jdbc4 jar lib sqlitejdbc v056 jar lib commons lang 2 4 jar Notice the line Bundle ActivationPolicy lazy Eclip
62. sary for that Input of the Con tainerCheckedTreeViewer is simply a LinkedList of Mail objects MailTreeContent Provider which implements interface ITreeContentProvider contains three meth ods telling the ContainerCheckedTreeViewer the structure of the given data No tably first the top level elements need to be defined After that if some of them have children those need to be pointed out Date Author 703 04 2006 09 51 Matthew 03 04 2006 11 13 Florent D M 03 04 2006 11 18 Matthew L 30 08 2008 02 45 Matthew Figure 3 14 Looks of the current implementation of the MailView class MailTreeLabelProvider is much simpler than MailTreeContentProvider Given 35 3 3 Implementation of REmail a single Mail object it decides what text should appear in different columns of the viewer That is made possible by implementing ITableLabelProvider interface The other two subclasses CheckStateProvider and CheckStateListener man age the checkbox feature of the ContainerCheckedTreeViewer The former class defines which e mails are to be checked or otherwise while displaying results The latter is a listener that is informed when user checks or unchecks any box The indexed information is updated in the SQLite database MailView incorporates a listener that waits for changes of selection in the Eclipse workbench If an instance of ICompilationUnit has been selected a method of MailView will check whether any data ha
63. se by default only preloads the plug ins defined by their manifests The extension is fully loaded and all resources allocated at the time of actual usage of plug in by the time we open some of its views or execute a plug in added command in the menu Plugin xml Plugin xml is an essential file defined by every plug in that allows developers to specify in XML format any extension point that is needed or defined by the plug in Every extension point comes with mandatory and optional arguments which describe the plug in integration precisely Points of extension are added as lt extension gt tags with the arguments added as sub tags An example describing the Mail View of REmail follows lt extension point org eclipse ui views gt lt view class org eclipse remail MailView icon icons sample gif id org eclipse emailrecommender MailView name E mails restorable true gt lt view gt lt extension gt The java class implementing the specified functionality is pointed out For any extension point in REmail a class needs to implement particular interface provided by Eclipse as depicted in its documentation 18 3 2 The evolution of REmail 3 2 The evolution of REmail aff Idea of creating REmail came as logical step after the research on Lightweight source code to e mail linking techniques conducted by Bacchelli et al in 2009 2 The initial idea was very simple To have an integration into an IDE that woul
64. src freenet client ArchiveManager java trunk freenet src freenet client FetchContext java trunk freenet src freenet client async ClientGetter java trunk freenet src freenet client async USKRetriever java Figure 4 2 Related however irrelevant e mail linked by Strict technique After observing such behavior we decided to implement a message filtering see Section for allowing the user to reject messages based on subject and author fields Such feature immediately proved to be helpful The e mails posted to the mailing list of Freenet by the version control systems have a special subject thus by creating a filter we were able to remove all the unnecessary e mails Messages posted to the Freenet development list by cvs are marked by the specific string shown in Figure Therefore by setting up filtering using it all these e mails are removed from the results and neither they appear in 51 4 2 Refining results to obtain relevant information the E mails view nor they are counted in the number of hits in the Package Explorer v 30 05 2008 10 26 luke771 freenet dev ITA 110n update 05 30 v 12 08 2008 06 07 Daniel Cheng freenet dev freenet cvs r21704 in branches sal M 05 09 2008 09 05 Cooo freenet dev New swedish translation v 06 09 2008 12 15 Cooo freenet dev Another update to the swedish translati mM 09 11 2008 03 54 Daniel Cheng freenet dev freenet cvs Veri O 11 11 2008 05 47 Matthew Toseland
65. ssion Figure was constructed to get close to upper bound of precision s lt beginning of package gt ISLAS lt last part of package gt Ne MAIZ lt class name gt java class s Figure 2 1 Strict regular expression as implemented in REmail In this approach source code file extensions and package fragments are taken into account the last part of package name is required Since such regular expression is quite rigorous case sensitivity is not observed 4 Loose regular expression case sensitive Strict regular expression ap proach indeed brings precision to a high numbel However the recall is minimal Thus the strictest criterion requiring the presence of last part of 4The percentage of relevant e mails actually retrieved on all the relevant e mails existing 5Many irrelevant e mails were also linked SE g ArchiveManager or MailContentView 794 of all relevant e mails in ArgoUML test case 8Only 10 of relevant e mails were present 11 2 2 E mail to code linking techniques package was dropped Presence of quotation marks next to the name was allowed as well s lt package gt AA lt class name gt java class s Figure 2 2 Loose regular expression as implemented in REmail 5 Mixed using dictionary case Sensitive If we take into account the strict method and the method using just a classname for search they score op posit
66. st in most situations when the search is applied on variety of classes or if not on 12 2 2 E mail to code linking techniques the entire project in the same time However the other methods are also useful when the developer needs to achieve the highest possible precision or recall in cost of the other measure Chapter 3 REmail In this chapter we detail REmail an Eclipse plug in we have created to put the ideas previously presented into practice First we introduce Eclipse itself we get acquainted with its structure and the basics of plug in development Then in section we tell the story of REmail and we describe how it has evolved since we have started working on it Following that we explain the state of the current implementation of REmail detailing the how various parts of the plug in are realized 3 3 Finally the last section is the user manual with goal of explaining how to install setup and use REmail in practice 3 4 3 1 Eclipse With the goal of putting the idea of e mail integration into prac tice we had to decide what IDE we would actually use There are many choices especially if we consider the various develop ment environments for different programming languages The idea was certainly to make REmail work in an IDE that can be used for developing systems in multiple languages Since the linking techniques were shown to work with many pro gramming languages 5 therefore many environment
67. st or table Editors edit a certain resource often a file There are different types of editors in any Eclipse distribution when opening a file for editing the proper type of editor is chosen based on file extension Eclipse editor framework allows plug in developers to create all aspects of a typical IDE editor on their own including autocompletion menus hovers and syntax coloring Some of the most common generic editors like default Java editor can also be extended by plug ins 1 2 www netbeans org www eclipse org 3A set of advanced widgets based on Standard Widget Toolkit offered by Eclipse project http wiki eclipse org index php JFace 15 3 1 Eclipse Plug in Development REmail src org eclipse remail MailView java Eclipse Users vita Documents workspace C c H S m e Ov Q 2H GCG G Sr ES SO Team Synchr KFDebug SH java 5 Plug in Deve pide EM Ar gee er o Editors H Package 5 35 Plug ins m 1 as s gt LU de fogella plugin htmiconverter J org echipse remail e a a Implementation of the view with the results of the email se public class MailView extends ViewPart m public static final String ID org eclipse emailrecommenc T public MailContentView mailContentView null instance private static ContainerCheckedTreeViewer viewer gt Gadi ax private Action selectionChangedAction
68. t method also implies that you have Eclipse distribution for RCP Plug in developers installed The other possible installation consists in visiting the download section of REmail website or its Google Code pagq There you can download jar file a precompiled distribution of REmail Copying the jar file into the plugins directory of your Eclipse will cause the plug in to be loaded on the next start of the platform 3 4 2 Setting up After having installed the plug in you must decide which mailing list you desire as data source We recommend the MBox file source as we also made an auto mated tool available to download any open source mailing list into MBox file If you prefer to use PSQL as a data source you must create a table and upload data in format that will be described later http remail inf usi ch Shttp r email googlecode com 39 3 4 Using REmail type filter text REmail Pr Dr y gt General E gt Ant General settings gt Help Mailing list source gt instal Update Thnuderbird Mbox gt Java gt Model Validation O PostgreSQL ObjectAid Class Di n ag SO Alaa Prefered classname matching method CamelCase gt Plug in Development Message Filters PostgreSQL 2 Thunderbird Mbox Y Restore Defaults Apply lt gt FN lt i 2 Cancel a Figure 3 17 Main preference page To set up REmail open Eclipse s preferences look for the REmail category and click on it
69. tecture than implementing new features 9 e Instant messaging is close to face to face meetings Thanks to the nature of modern real time protocols developers communicate as in real life except that they are using textual means instead of natural languages It is not used frequently in collocated teams where developers can meet face to face but is often employed inside various open source communi ties where it provides means for rapid coordination and for conducting online meetings to discuss various development issues 114 9 8 Re sponses on instant messages are expected immediately which is usually 1E g Bugzilla Mantis or Jira 2E g Internet Relay Client IRC XMPP ICQ etc 8 2 1 Communication between developers the case Also developers can have parallel IM conversations with many counterparts However similarly to face to face IM has disadvantages Particularly the synchronous aspect of instant messages raises the issue of interruption and loss of concentration As with all synchronized means of communication problems of dialogue between people in different time zones emerges as well Internet telephony With introduction of applicationg for conducting online voice conversation internet telephony seems to be taking off as a new way of communication among developers Unlike when using telephones it is still closely related to instant messag ing We presume that developers prefer to use IM for code re
70. that works on the same project Since developers work on IDEs that are not connected one to another they must find alternative ways for communicating ideas and synchronizing work There are many ways of communication between them In addition to face to face meetings developers often communicate through instant messaging notes inside commits commenting the source code posting bug reports or they can post e mails inside mailing lists 4 Face to face meetings are the preferred method of communication when de velopers work in a collocated team However in the development of large open source systems developers might be spread all over world thus making fre quent face to face meetings difficult if not impossible to organize Studies report 9 that in these cases e mails are the most widely used means of communication among software developers For large projects various mailing list are usually established to allow information exchange Nevertheless as the name suggests development lists are those that are most important for developers 1Those often marked with a dev or devel keyword 2 1 1 Goal of this project Such mailing lists are used to communicate about various programming is sues that raise during development Therefore these archives contain e mails that are an important source of information about high level design decisions as well as low level implementation concerns and developers social structure 5 P
71. tions Usually developers start creating them before commencing coding tasks There fore design documents in both graphical and textual form serve as the point of rationalizing the structure both for first hand developers as well as ones that join the project later and need to master the system architec ture structure On the other hand since being produced ahead design documents often fail to keep track of the project evolution and get less precise in relation to source code with time In addition design documents mostly describe only a high level view of the system For these reasons it is often difficult to find the traceability link between actual source code and design documents 10 1 e Code comments as an opposite to design documents are tightly related to the lowest level model of the system the source code itself This means that information contained in them cannot be used to describe higher level relations between artifacts They are already linked to all of the code artifacts that they annotate since they are part of the source code itself This induces code commits simply for updating them They also leave no space for discussion 2 1 Communication between developers e Commit comments are already linked to the source code as well In rela tion to code comments commit comments have broader focus as they can mark out changes in more than just single file In this way they can give insight into higher level comp
72. volution of REmail Should work but messy What is maxArchiveSize in the ArchiveManager diff One is per request and the other one is global to all others IMHO we should get rid of the global setting and the config that controls it and replace it by a constant Figure 3 7 Marking threaded conversation in the text of e mail Inspired by RE message highlighting in Thunderbird and a general style of displaying messages on markmail org we changed the look Figure 3 7 of this view Now the text from previous e mails is preceded by a number of differently colored lines and presented in a different font color Editor improvements Most of the time that developers spend using Eclipse and other similar IDEs is focused on the Editors where they actually work with the source code Often enough while working with smaller monitors laptops etc they might maxi mize the editor to completely fill the screen By doing so REmail s views are invisible Therefore we wanted to contribute into the editors of Eclipse itself to provide some support in this situation too Text hovers Our original idea was to extend the Eclipse s Javadoc hover It appears while going over some keyword with a mouse pointer After researching how to implement this feature we found that this would require cloning and creating a special editor to do so Since we wanted to have this feature present in the default editors of any Eclipse distribution we de
73. we show the number of e mails linked with it using the preferred method With package we show the number of e mails linked to all of its classes r FB freenet client 291 LJ ArchiveContext java 7 When conducting a search on a bigger number of classes at once time nec essary to complete the linking process can become long Thus we have made a progress bar that shows how many classes out of total have already been linked ye eet ee ee ee eee eee Ar D Ee ent bine hena filene Figure 3 5 Search process progress bar Viewing the results of linking The E mails view has evolved considerably In its first implementation Figure 3 3 it simply contained a table presenting results using a couple columns By 10More in chapter 4 25 3 2 The evolution of REmail putting threading of e mails into practice came the need to show this additional information Therefore we modified the view to show data using a tree viewer component of JFace 11 08 2UU U5 5U batosal freenet dev French transiation 17 08 2007 08 52 Florent DaignivOre freenet dev RFD frd 17 08 2007 11 40 Philipp Riegger freenet dev RFD free 22 08 2007 06 09 luke771 freenet dev ita 110n v22 21 09 2007 08 47 luke771 freenet dev ITA 11On update Figure 3 6 E mail view using tree viewer Still we felt the information was not presented in a sufficiently clean manner As a next improvement we joined the previous tabl
74. y are interested in and submit them for the 59 56 5 2 Future Improvements linking process the E mails view where the results of linking are presented to the developer and E mail content view which presents individual e mails in a structured and enhanced way REmail is also integrated in the source code editor where programmers have access to the results of linking without the need to have the additional views open During the development we have used the Freenet software system and its development mailing list as a case study This gave us immediate feedback on the usability of REmail and allowed us to improve it in order to achieve the most out of the linking techniques We also have many ideas for other improvements that we plan to implement as future work 5 2 Future Improvements REmail is still evolving Even though its current features and capabilities make it an useful tool for any Java developer we plan to improve its usability internal structure and more Mailing lists management The ability to obtain any desired mailing list and make it available for REmail is essential We plan to provide users with other modules to import mailing list from other sources e Currently a user can obtain a mailing list from MarkMail org free service using modified Miler tool However this method of acquiring e mail data has a limitation The web crawler that is part of Miler is dependent on the MarkMail website During

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