Better Software - April 2008 - (Page 32)

A s A developer, I often have the feeling that I am writing code that others have previously written. How often have you built a standard application structure such as a GUI to modify or retrieve information from a database, built code to iterate through a sequence of objects, or scratched your head trying to determine the most efficient approach for storing data in a Perl hash? We shouldn’t have to create such common code from scratch. Many approaches are available to enable code reuse. Perhaps the most widely used at present are libraries containing frameworks, such as those for logging, presentation, or database-connection pooling. But just keeping track of the growing number of potentially viable frameworks is a headache for developers everywhere. Being heavily involved with Java, I find this burden increasing rather than decreasing over time. The Java library, useful as it is, is large enough that it is not always easy to find what I need. Software search engines may be the answer to finding chunks of reusable code. This article reviews some popular source code search engines in common use (links are located in the StickyNotes). search engine products. There are a significant number online, mostly commercial and paid for by advertisements. The prime example of this genre is the Google Code Search shown in figure 1. The interface is very easy to use. Search engine spiders crawl across the Web for information, index it, and display it in ranked order. For source code search engines, the search material is code gleaned from repositories such as sourceforge.net, which houses more than 100,000 open source projects; Apache projects; and other well-known open source applications. The spiders index not only source code but also Javadoc comments and POD for Perl, as well as documentation and code-specific wikis such as Wikicodia. Source code engines differ from generic text search engines in how they organize the results. Since code is organized into functions, classes, packages, etc., source code engines display results in a way that reflects that organization. To remain competitive, each search engine has slightly different emphases. The Krugle search engine, for example, provides excellent scoping via search-by-language and licensing options and by differentiating between comments, function definitions, function calls, and class definitions. WhAt Are source code seArch engines? Source code search engines have been adapted from generic source code seArch plug-ins Browser-based search engines target a general audience and play well to the use case of ad hoc searching. Developers, Figure 1: The main page for Google Code Search Figure 2: Koders’ context-sensitive search with Eclipse 32 BETTER SOFTWARE APRIL 2008 www.StickyMinds.com http://sourceforge.net http://www.StickyMinds.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Better Software - April 2008

Better Software - April 2008 Contents Mark Your Calendar Contributions eLightenment Technology Speaking - A Change Would Do You Good Code Craft - A "D" In Programming, Part 1 Test Connection - Learning the Hardware Lessons Management Chronicles - The Art of Persuading Management Cover Story - Incremental and Iterative Development Developers...Start Your Engines Where Do I Go From Here Product Announcements 10 Things You Might Not Know About... The Last Word - Software Quality and the Prisoner's Dilemma Ad Index

Better Software - April 2008

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