BIOS: Technology Means Business

Well before search titan Google released its tool to help developers scour the Web for code and connected information, Koders was serving up software search results, starting with open source software and now spreading out to include closed code repositories as well.

Since launching its first beta in 2004, Koders has expanded its search to include more than 424 million lines of code, at the same time honing in on what developers are demanding.

Koders.com is now a leading search engine for open source code. It enables software developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories. Koders has created a comprehensive map of the open source landscape that represents tens of thousands of projects from hundreds of repositories.

The site’s source code-optimised 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. By providing deep code search, coupled with metadata and links to the projects themselves, developers have an excellent tool to discover quality projects to leverage in their applications. IDE Plugins for Eclipse and Visual Studio also include SmartSearch, which goes a step beyond and makes proactive suggestions to developers as they code - to guide developers toward opportunities for reuse - before they hit a road block or reinvent the wheel.

Let’s say you want to write a GPLed online card game, like bridge, in C, and wanted to see how others had handled shuffling the cards. On Koders.com you can search for ‘shuffle cards’ with the licence option set to GPL and the language set to C. After clicking the ‘Search’ button the results screen shows one hit: a program called server.c from the UNO - Card Game project on SourceForge (another OSTG property, like NewsForge). You’ll then find both the project and the specific program linked to from the results page. Clicking on ‘server.c’ then presents plenty of meat for your own project. Very impressive!

Koders Enterprise Edition even enables organisations to recognise significant productivity gains by improving code reuse. Developers and managers can search, review and report on the enterprise code base in ways never before possible.

As for code quality, Jorn Teutloff, co-founder and vice president of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company said the site evaluates a number of factors related to user activity, and assigns values to code. “We track what they search for, what they download and what they are reusing. Through time, the better projects bubble up to the top. Our ranking mechanism presents the most pertinent results first.”

And while downloads alone don’t necessarily equate to usefulness, Darren Rush, the company’s co-founder and chief architect, said the statistic becomes more telling over time. “In the context of hundreds or thousands of results, we start to see a trend that [one specific piece of code] might be a strong solution to a particular problem.”