PROGRAMMERS GET THEIR OWN SEARCH ENGINE

Developers can use Google and other search engines to find source code, but it’s not easy.

A Silicon Valley startup claims to have come up with a better alternative — a search engine for source code and code-related information.

The tool, known as Krugle, is designed to deliver easy access to source code and other highly relevant technical information in a single, convenient, clean, easy-to-use interface, according to the company. Krugle works by crawling, parsing, and indexing code found in open source repositories and code that exists in archives, mailing lists, blogs, and Web pages.

It’s based on a combination of open-source and proprietary technology, according to the company.

On the open-source side, it’s based on the Apache Software Foundation’s Nutch and Lucene Web search projects, as well as on the Antlr (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) parser generator.

While the Krugle search engine is not itself open-source, the company says it participates in the open-source projects from which part of Krugle’s code springs, and also in other development communities.

What Krugle does

"Today, programming is more about efficiently assembling and integrating code, than it is about writing new code from scratch," explained co-founder and CEO Steve Larsen in a statement. "The problem is, finding and evaluating the available code takes too much time. That’s the problem Krugle solves."

"Finding, evaluating and downloading the right code is a common developer task that consumes massive amounts of developer time," added co-founder and CTO Ken Krugler. "This process has difficulties because of the way software projects and components are currently accessed on the Internet."

"While current search engines are OK at finding Web pages, they don’t crawl source code repositories, archives or knowledge bases, and they don’t leverage the inherent structure of code to support the types of searches programmers," Krugler continued.

Krugle does more than just search code, though. Developers must also sift through project information, documentation, license information, tips and hints, and so on, when making decisions regarding what code to use. The company claims that its search engine can deliver the precise information programmers needs to solve their immediate problems.

In addition, a Wiki-like feature in Krugle enables developers to add tags and commentary in a layer that "floats" above the source code. It also lets programmers permanently tag code and sets of search results, and then easily share the tagged information with their colleagues, according to the company.

"The implications of the open-source movement are dramatic and can’t be understated," noted Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO Conference. "Everyone agrees that open source is the wave of the future, and Krugle is riding that wave by helping programmers find the code they need to do their job."

Availability

Silicon Valley-based Krugle will be announcing the beta of its new search engine at two conferences February 7th — DEMO in Phoenix, and the Evans Data Development Relations Conference in San Francisco.

Beta testers can sign up for the search engine on Krugle’s website. The project is schedule to go live for testing on March 8th at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.