Apatite: a new interface for exploring APIs

We present Apatite, a new tool that aids users in learning and understanding a complex API by visualizing the common associations between its various components. Current object-oriented API documentation is usually navigated in a fixed tree structure, starting with a package and then filtering by a specific class. For large APIs, this scheme is overly restrictive, because it prevents users from locating a particular action without first knowing which class it belongs to. Apatite’s design instead enables users to search across any level of an API’s hierarchy. This is made possible by

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Daniel S. Eisenberg, Jeffrey Stylos, Brad A. Myers
• Keywords: CHI 2010, Complex Api, Current Object-oriented Api, Fixed Tree Structure, Human Computer Interaction