Find Code, Find Answers!
At the opening day of Demo 06 turned the spotlight on open source with three companies leveraging the collaborative and community nature of the model to bring developers and users closer together.
“Here Comes a Google for Coders!” For most people, open source is a synonym for free software. But for programmers, open source is about sharing code, building on the work of others and not having to reinvent the wheel — at least, that’s the ideal. In practice, code reuse remains very low, because it’s often too hard for programmers to find relevant bits of code for their applications.
Krugle Provides Programmers a Single Place to Quickly Find the Source Code They Need, the Information They Need to Evaluate it, and the Tools They Need to Share It.
Krugle, Inc., has unveiled its search engine for source code and related technical content. The Krugle search solution promises to deliver easy access to code and other highly relevant technical information in a single, convenient, easy-to-use interface.
"Krugle is a search engine for programmers," said Krugle Co-Founder and CEO, Steve Larsen. "Today programming is more about efficiently assembling and integrating code, than it is about writing new code from scratch. The problem is, finding and evaluating the available code takes too much time. That’s the problem Krugle solves."
"We are the Google for programming code," said Larsen.
This new search engine for programmers promises to alleviate that problem by making it easier to find and share code. Developers can use Krugle to either search for keywords or they can actually drop code into the search bar. That in turn could increase programmers’ productivity and give a fresh boost to the open-source movement.
Krugle–which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the "technical web" — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)
Krugle finds source code files and, because the search engine also understands the language the source code was written in, it preserves the structure of the code rather than just presenting a string of hard to read text, said Larsen.
This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world, said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March.
The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.
Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing "PHP registration system."
Greg Olson, a co-founder of early open-source success story Sendmail and a consultant with the Olliance Group said Krugle will make it easier to reuse program components — something that the open-source movement has long promised, but never effectively delivered on. “Olson advised Krugle on the startup’s open-source usage.”
"It is so cumbersome now to use tools like Google to search for code that the majority of programmers just write their own code," said Olson — even if they know that an open-source component is probably available that would meet their needs. "If you cannot find the pieces, it is too frustrating to try to reuse components. But if you can reuse components, you can get a factor-of-10 improvement in productivity."
Finding Code: Finding; evaluating and downloading the right code–is a common developer task that consumes massive amounts of developer time. "This process has difficulties because of the way software projects and components are currently accessed on the Internet," notes Ken Krugler. "While current search engines are OK at finding Web pages, they do not, crawl source code repositories, archives or knowledge bases, and they do not leverage the inherent structure of code to support the types of searches programmers need."
Finding Answers: Developers sift through many separate pieces of information (project information, documentation, license information, tips & hints, user reviews, and legal information), that must be considered when making decisions on what code to use. Krugle delivers the precise information a programmer needs to solve their immediate problem.
Beyond Search: Krugle also improves communication between programmers by allowing them to add their commentary in a layer that floats above the source code. In addition, Krugle allows programmers to permanently tag code, and sets of search results, and easily share them with their colleagues.
"The implications of the open source movement are dramatic and cannot be understated," noted Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences.
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.
Krugle will make money from advertising on its free, public search engine. The company is also planning to create an enterprise edition, due in 2007, to facilitate code-sharing within companies.
For More information please visit: http://www.krugle.com