Open Source Software Search Engines

Lately I was thinking about all the open source code which is available around the world. I was asking myself, how it would be possible to search through all this code and to use it for studies and analysis.

Of course, this is not a new idea and I was surprised how many tools try to address this topic in one or another way...

Source Code:

• http://www.koders.com/
  
  
  
  From the site: Koders.com is the leading search engine for open source code. Our source code optimized search engine provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be leveraged in their applications.
  


• http://www.jexamples.com/
  
  
  
  From the site: We analyze the source code of production Java open source projects such as Ant, Tomcat and Batik and load that analysis into a database designed for easy searching. You enter the name of a Java Class.method you want to see example invocations of and click Search.
  


• http://archive.devx.com/sourcebank/
  
  
  
  From the site: DevX's Sourcebank is a directory of links to source code and script posted around the Web. Use the Search option to find terms within the source code. To cast the widest net, use the search with All Types selected. Or, you can browse through a subset of the code by categories (below). First, select a filter, such as C or Java, by clicking on one of the square buttons and then choose one of the categories (such as Mathematics) from within that filter.
  


• http://gonzui.sourceforge.net/
  
  From the site: gonzui is a source code search engine for accelerating open source software development. In the open source software development, programmers frequently refer to source codes written by others. Our goal is to help programmers develop programs effectively by creating a source code search engine that covers vast quantities of open source codes available on the Internet.
  

Components, Libraries:

• http://www.codezoo.net/
  
  
  
  From the site: CodeZoo exists to help you find high-quality, freely available, reusable components, getting you past the repetitive parts of coding, and onto the rest and the best of your projects. It’s a fast-forward button for your compiler.
  


• http://www.jarhoo.com/
  
  
  
  From the site: Searches for jar files or fully qualified java class names usually performed under 2 seconds. Package or non-qualified class name searches may take around 10 seconds
  

Javadoc:

• http://www.jdocs.com/
  
  
  
  From the site: JDocs is a comprehensive online resource for Java API documentation. All the javadocs for a variety of popular packages are loaded into our db-driven system, and users can contribute their own notes to virtually any class, field, method. In short, JDocs provides a knowledge base defined around the major Java api's themselves, so you can find the information you're looking for right where it should be... in the documentation!
  


• http://javadocs.org/
  
  From the site: You can search from the url, eg: javadocs.org/string
  


• http://ashkelon.sourceforge.net/
  
  
  
  From the site: ashkelon is an open source project. It is a Java API documentation tool designed for Java developers. Its goals are the same as the goals of the well-known javadoc tool that comes with J2SE, whose user interface most java developers are quite familiar with.