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Infrastructure for Building Code Search Applications for Developers

  • Chapter
Book cover Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse

Abstract

The large availability of open source code on the Web provides great opportunities to build useful code search applications for developers. Building such applications requires addressing several challenges inherent in collecting and analyzing code from open source repositories to make them available for search. An infrastructure that supports collection, analysis, and search services for open source code available on the Web can greatly facilitate building effective code search applications. This chapter presents such an infrastructure called Sourcerer that facilitates collection, analysis, and search of source code available in code repositories on the Web. This chapter provides useful information to researchers and implementors of code search applications interested in harnessing the large availability of source code in the repositories on the Web. In particular, this chapter highlights key aspects of Sourcerer that supports combining Software Engineering and Information Retrieval techniques to build effective code search applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This code structure information was originally intended to be used in implementing code similarity techniques based on detailed code structures, but was not developed further as development in Sourcerer proceeded.

  2. 2.

    Maven is a build system for Java that provides the facility to fetch required libraries from a central repository [42].

  3. 3.

    Packages are not considered to be standard declared entities as they do not have a single declaration.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Joel Ossher, Otavio Lemos, Trung Ngo, Huy Hunh, Paul Rigor, and Erik Linsted for their contributions to the Sourcerer infrastructure. The author would like to thank Cristina Lopes and Pierre Baldi for their advice and support in making Sourcerer successful.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Black Duck Software, Burlington, MA, USA

    Sushil Krishna Bajracharya

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  1. Sushil Krishna Bajracharya
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Correspondence to Sushil Krishna Bajracharya .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Many Roads Studios, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Susan Elliott Sim

  2. Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA

    Rosalva E. Gallardo-Valencia

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Bajracharya, S.K. (2013). Infrastructure for Building Code Search Applications for Developers. In: Sim, S.E., Gallardo-Valencia, R.E. (eds) Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6596-6

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