Can undergraduates script their own refactorings?

Abstract

We present a status report on a project to build a refactoring engine whose primary goal is to allow undergraduate students to write classical and neo-classical refactorings (pull-up, class partitioning) and design patterns (visitor, framework) as parameterized refactoring scripts in Java. We explain the first step of our work that creates a reflection-like interface to expose the structure of an Eclipse JDT application as Java objects; methods of these objects are refactorings. Doing so hides the complexity of JDT refactoring code and tools, so that refactoring scripts can be written as compact Java methods. We present preliminary performance results of scripting JDT refactorings and sketch the next steps of our work.