Friday, May 13, 2005

Search for source code

This had to come soon enough. I am referring to koders.com, a new vertical search engine for open source code. It has an extremely simple Google-like user interface. Plus, it allows users to specify the programming language and/or the License for the code being searched for.

I just ran a few test searches today - Koders returns search results really fast - but the search as of now looks like a simple text search through the source files. So unless the programmer's did a good job of commenting the code (yeah.. right!!), it is going to be hard to find results. It worked well for common data structures like B-trees, doubly linked lists, etc., but failed to return any useful results for something like - a P-trie.

Its a good idea, but a little short on implementation. Btw, Koders is also selling an Enterprise edition for search within enterprise code bases.

Speaking of code search, I must mention the IBM Prospector project. I first read about the prospector late last year. IBM is working on this with UC Berkeley and a beta version of Prospector can be found (at most times..) at the link above. The problem with Prospector is, that it is a search engine only for Java code. The final version of Prospector is expected to come out by the end of the year.

1 Comments:

At May 16, 2005 3:57 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I like the Prospector style. At least for Java specific search, the results should be categorized based on packages or JSRs.

 

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