Detecting entry points in java libraries

When writing a Java library, it is very difficult to hide functionality that is intended not to be used by clients. The visibility concept of Java often forces the developer to expose implementation details. Consequently, we find a high number of public classes and methods in many Java libraries. Thus, client programmers must rely on documentation in order to identify the entry points of the library, i.e. the methods originally intended to be used by clients. In this paper, we introduce a new metric, called the Method Weight , that assists in detecting entry points. Applying this metric on some well-known open-source Java libraries considerably supported the process of identifying their entry points. Furthermore, the metric provides a classification criterion to distinguish libraries with focused functionality from plain collections of utility classes.