jTutors: A Web-Based Tutoring System For Java APIs

For building robust software applications, it is important for the software engineer to make efficient use of the available building blocks. Learning the basic language constructs is only the first step in this process. It is becoming increasingly important for software engineers, especially students, to get acquainted with the available Application Programming Interfaces (API) and the ways to efficiently use them. With the ever increasing number of APIs, it becomes difficult for teachers to expose students to most of the APIs. Hence it becomes important to complement the traditional methods of instruction, such as lectures or API documentation, with techniques that would ease learning by software engineering students.\ud We have leveraged the freely available code examples on various Internet communities, blogs and software project hosting websites to create an intelligent tutoring system, jTutors, which would aid the teacher in exposing students to multitudes of the available Java APIs. jTutors uses these code samples to generates intelligent tutorials. We evaluated jTutors by performing realistic test cases and a heuristic assessment