A new search engine that debuted at Demo 2006 focuses on the needs of programmers to help find source code and other technical content.
Real Programmers don’t comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
— coding wisdom from the “Golden Era of Computers ”
Krugle will help Java coders and other developers to delve into their repositories of source code and find a particular bit of programming they need. The search engine has been scheduled to launch as a public beta on March 8th, during the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
The search engine works by “crawling, parsing and indexing code found in all open source repositories, as well as code that exists in archives, mailing lists, blogs, and web pages,” the company said.
It also automatically generates API reports, which show how code components integrate with other components based on the API calls those components make. Krugle detailed further capabilities of the engine regarding how it can help with queries about code issues:
Krugle also provides answers to code-related technical questions, enabling real-time comprehension by presenting contextual information quickly and efficiently: related code, dependencies, licensing information, compatibility requirements, bug reports and news group postings. Krugle’s intelligent crawlers evaluate sites and search only those that are technical, so search results are highly relevant.
Ken Krugler, the company’s CTO and co-founder (and we’re guessing the source of the search engine’s name), described the difficulties of finding code and code-related information using existing search technology in a statement:
“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 need.”
Also, Krugle embraces some of the “social media” concepts that have become popular in modern web applications. Coders can save their searches in a “content bundle” they can share with other coders. Krugle lets coders tag lines or sections of code with comments as they do queries.
At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying “Poor George. And he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary.”
— another anecdote from the “Golden Era of Computers”
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
