Evaluating Usability Aspects of PJama Based on Source Code Measurements

PJama is a system that provides orthogonal persistence defined by reachability with no changes to the Java [13] language. Introduction of persistence into the Java language is expected to give software productivity gains and reduce maintenance costs. A set of hypotheses that investigate these expectations have been defined and tested. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it describes a tool that automatically measures the use of persistence in Java source code given a keywordfile specific to the technology being used. Second, we have tested a set of hypotheses applying this measurement technology. The results indicate that it is possible to have persistence with minimal changes to the source code in PJama. The results also indicate that the number of lines that explicitly use persistence does not grow with the size of the application.