A structured-based differencing method for version control system for java codes

In this paper, a new proposed method for extracting the syntax differences between different Java code versions is designed and implemented to support CVSs based on optimistic approach. This proposed algorithm relies on converting the codes into XML through Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) algorithm followed by applying a modified difference algorithm using a separate chaining within a hash table to extract the syntax differences between code versions. This proposed algorithm is implemented as a web page interface to enable a quick client server interaction with the use of some existing tools based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Asynchronous JavaScript, and AJAX platform. Experimentation results showed that our proposed method is efficient with comparing to the traditional line differencing algorithms.