About Koders
What is Koders.com?
Koders is a free public code search engine for open source code. The database that underlies Koders contains 3.3 billion lines of code and reflects the contents of the majority of world’s major open source repositories, with syntax-highlighting for over 30 programming languages. The search database is further enhanced with additional code and metadata from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, the industry’s most complete database of open source and third-party code.
How is Koders different from internet search engines?
Internet search engines are not “code-knowledgeable”, and also include the noise of non-code results. Koders allows you to search or filter specifically for class, method, and interface definitions. Koders also provides syntax-highlighting and further project code browsing for better understanding of a particular open source file or project. Koders uses proprietary user heuristics to allow more popular code files to work their way to the top. Essentially, the more reuse a code file receives, the more likely it will appear higher in your search results.'
How do I search for code written in a specific programming language?
Simply select a language from the dropdown list under the search box when submitting your search.
What programming languages are supported?
Koders currently uses ctags. The programming languages supported are the same as the ctags support list.
Note: We will be adding 10+ more languages as a part of our pending upgrade.
What search query syntax does Koders support?
Koders provides various ways to restrict or expand search results by using special operators on your search terms, including:
Search for phrases
You can search for phrases such as "public event" by enclosing the search term in double quotes.
CamelCase
When using CamelCase, the terms are queried as separate terms. To search as a single term, keep everything lowercase -- foreachtag.
Class Definitions
Search for classes whose name contains <search term>.
For example, searching for 'cdef:parser' will return files with class names containing 'parser'.
Method Definitions
Search for methods whose name contains <search term>
For example, searching for 'mdef:insert' will return files with method names containing 'insert'
Interface Definitions
Search for interfaces whose name contains <search term>
For example, searching for 'idef:configuration' will return files with interface names containing 'configuration'.
Compound Definitions
Search for classes named 'tree' with a method named 'insert'
For example, searching for 'cdef:tree mdef:insert' will return files with classes named 'tree' with a method named 'insert'
Search Syntax
Note: With the exception of CamelCase, searches are case-insensitive. Searching for 'Xml' is the same as searching for 'XML' is the same as search for 'xML' etc.
Note: Koders does not, at this time, support regular expressions. That said, we are currently underway with a number of important improvements to both the data and features in Koders, so we would like to hear from you with some examples of the queries that you submit in the regex realm and what results you’d like to see returned so that we can best provide the related functionality and nice ranking around those results.
Can I search the Koders database from my favorite IDE?
Koders has free IDE plug-ins for Visual Studio and Eclipse. These plug-ins include SmartSearch™.
How frequently is the Koders codebase updated?
The codebase in Koders reflects over 3.3b lines of code. While much of the code comes from projects leading up to the Black Duck acquisition of Koders in 2008, thousands of new projects have been added through March of 2010. In the next few months, we will be implementing a new, more automated update process that will substantially refresh and increase the searchable codebase by 3-5x.
How do I add my code to the Koders database?
Because we are in the middle of a major upgrade to Koders, we are not actively adding projects at this time. Once we complete the upgrade, we will be using the Ohloh.net project list for populating projects, so if your project, its metadata, and its code are specified on Ohloh then it will be added to the queue for addition to Koders after the Koders upgrade.
How do I get my code removed from Koders?
Please contact us and let us know. We will need time to address these requests.
How can I provide feedback?
We are actively improving Koders.com. We would like Koders to be sleek and simple. Please let us know your thoughts and ideas around what would be most valuable to you.
What is this “upgrade” that you keep talking about?
To make Koders a scalable resource, we are underway in a complete rearchitecture of the site. We’re upgrading Koders to use the latest version of Code Sight (v2) plus some additional enhancement, so if you’d like to see some of the things we’ve done so far, check out Code Sight. (Code Sight is free to use for indexing up to 5m lines of code.) We will also be addressing many user submitted improvement/requests (i.e. respecting the underscore -- instead of splitting the word.)
Although not yet live, we’ve already rebuilt the engine; migrated the entire code base from .NET to Java (our team’s language of choice); and made many enhancements to the technology along the way, including those listed below. We are currently doing scalability testing.
Enhancements:
- 3-5x the amount of searchable code
- Syntax highlighting for 10 new languages (43 total) including XML, OCaml, Haskell, F#
- Improved ranking of search results with relevant snippets for the matched files
- Filtering/faceting of search results
- Self-service project additions and indexing
While all of this this will be a leap forward for the site, we know that there is more we need to do. We will continue to invest in improving the site, addressing the shortcomings we are aware of and further improving and enhancing the search experience to meet your needs. We welcome your feedback.
Please stay tuned over the next couple months while we wrap up the development work.
Who operates Koders.com?
Koders.com is owned and maintained by Black Duck Software. Black Duck is in the business of helping companies more easily scale up their use of open source software leading to faster, lower-cost development. Together with ohloh.net, Koders.com is the cornerstone of our vision to create the most comprehensive and free resource for developers to find and explore open source projects and code.
Black Duck also provides commercially available tools to aid in the identification, evaluation, and management of open source software.
Interested in indexing and searching your internal code base?
Using Black Duck® Code Sight™, you can index your own internal code repositories so you can find, explore, understand, and reuse code. You can download a free Edition of Code Sight that lets you index up to 5 million lines of code. Learn more >>.
Contact
Black Duck Software, Inc.
8 New England Executive Park
Burlington, MA 01803
Tel: +1 781.891.5100
Fax: +1 781.891.5145
Email: info@blackducksoftware.com
http://www.blackducksoftware.com
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