Opiner: An opinion search and summarization engine for APIs

Opinions are key determinants to many of the activities related to software development. The perceptions of developers about an API, and the choices they make about whether and how they should use it, may, to a considerable degree, be conditioned upon how other developers see and evaluate the API. Given the plethora of APIs available for a given development task and the advent of developer forums as the media to share opinions about those APIs, it can be challenging for a developer to make informed decisions about an API to support the task. We introduce Opiner, our opinion search and summarization engine for API reviews. The server side of Opiner collects and summarizes opinions about APIs by crawling online developer forums and by associating the opinions found in the forum posts to the APIs discussed in the posts. The client side of Opiner is a Website that presents different summarized viewpoints of the opinions about the APIs in an online search engine. We evaluated Opiner by asking Industrial developers to select APIs for two development tasks. We found that developers were interested to use our proposed summaries of API reviews and that while combined with Stack Overflow, Opiner helped developers to make the right decision with more accuracy and confidence. The Opiner online search engine is available at: http://opiner.polymtl.ca. A video demo is available at: https://youtu.be/XAXpfmg5Lqs.