Nicholas Sawadsky
Gail C. Murphy
ABSTRACT
Implementing software development tools as integrated development environment (IDE) plugins gives tools direct access to a range of useful representations of the program being created and can improve programmer efficiency. These benefits must be weighed against the effort to integrate the tool into the IDE, effort which may need to be repeated for each IDE targeted. In this paper, we introduce Fishtail, a prototype plugin for the Eclipse IDE, which assists programmers in discovering code examples and documentation on the web relevant to their current task. Fishtail uses a detailed history of programmer interactions with the source code to automatically determine relevant web resources. We describe the key factors that make it attractive to implement Fishtail as a plugin, and the requirements Fishtail imposes on the plugin/IDE interface. To reach a broader user base and understand how well our tool supports different programming styles and IDE architectures, we have recently begun investigating how to make a version of Fishtail available in the Visual Studio IDE. We outline some of the challenges we face in trying to reuse code from the original Eclipse plugin.
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Digital Library
- Stylos, J. and Myers, B. Mica: A Web-Search Tool for Finding API Components and Examples. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 2006, 195--202. Google ScholarDigital Library
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- Brandt, J., Dontcheva, M., Weskamp, M., and Klemmer, S. R. Example-centric programming: integrating web search into the development environment. Proc. of the 28th Int'l Conf. on Human Factors in Comp. Sys., 2010, 513--522. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Fishtail: from task context to source code examples
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