New Tools to Submit Code to Krugle Code Search

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CodeShare News | April 22, 2008   6:34 PM | Comments (0)

The CodeShare community is all about creating code which other developers can use. For most of us getting something working quickly is a way to break the ice on a design.  Looking at others' work enables us learn from their experience. We like to work by example.

By some estimates, there may be between 3 and 5 billion lines of code on the Web. The problem is finding exactly what is needed along with the context to understand it. One solution is to use sites like the CodeShare community, where code samples and projects reside together in an organized way. The other is to use tools that intelligently search the Web.

While there are a number of code search engines available (Google Code Search and Koders come to mind), one of the best is Krugle. In 2005 Ken Krugler was working on Chandler, a part of Mitch Kapur's open source application foundation, when he realized that he was having trouble finding developer information. He started thinking about what the ideal search tool would look like.  The result is the Krugle code search engine.

Krugle's strength is that it goes beyond just finding code snippets to analyzing the code itself. It recognizes the results of a search as a function call, as a class definition or as a code comment, and it returns only the results which are relevant. What's the benefit? The user can easily follow an element in the code back to the data structure of the class where the element is defined. Equally important, Krugle assembles project level metadata such as project descriptions, licensing information and the language utilized.  This allows easy access to code by author, project, license, or other parameters. Krugle is unique in the degree to which it incorporates metadata to refine searches.

By an arrangement between Krugle, CollabNet and Dev2Dev, CodeShare has joined the elite club of large developer networks that Krugle supports. Open source sites such as IBM developerWorks, Sun's java.net, SourceForge.net, Amazon Web Services and Yahoo! Developer Network all have dedicated feeds updating Krugle's databases with their latest code. Now CodeShare does as well, and code samples and projects submitted to the feed will be quickly made available for developers everywhere.

Take advantage of Krugle's support of CodeShare by submitting your projects and code samples. You can learn more about contributing Dev2Dev code samples and projects to Krugle by going to the CodeShare Code submission portal. 

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