Building Flexible Refactoring Tools w ith XML

Refactoring, i.e., the process of changing a software system to improve its internal quality while preserving its external behavior, is gaining increasing acceptance among software developers. Even though many refactoring tools are now available for a v ariety of programming languages, most of them rely on their own, cl osed mechanisms for rep resenting and man ipulating sou rce co de information, which makes them difficult to customize, extend and reuse. This paper makes three contributions towards the development of more flexible refactoring tools. Firstly, it proposes an XML-centric refactoring process in which XML is used as a standard way to represent, analyze and modify source code information. Secondly, it presents a concrete realization of that process, in the form of a refactoring framework, called RefaX, which builds on existing XML-based source code models and processing technologies to facilitate the development, extension and reuse of refactoring tools. Finally, it demonstrates the applicability of the proposed process and framew ork through two RefaX-based refactoring prototypes for Java and C++, respectively.