So Krugle is about to come out and join the league of Koders, CodeFetch, CSourceSearch and likes. All of them intend to make discovery of source code from available repositories quicker and more efficient, and are primarily targeted towards programmers. So, apart from rhyming with Google, why should Krugle be more popular?
“Today, programming is more about efficiently assembling and integrating code than it is about writing new code from scratch,” said co-founder and CEO Steve Larsen in a statement.
“Finding, evaluating and downloading the right code is a common developer task that consumes massive amounts of developer time,” added Ken Krugler, co-founder and chief technology officer of the Menlo Park, Calif., company. “This process has difficulties because of the way software projects and components are currently accessed on the Internet.”
Krugle does more than just search code, though. Developers also must sift through project information, documentation, license information, tips and hints, and so on, when making decisions regarding what code to use. The company claims that its search engine can deliver the precise information programmers need to solve their immediate problems.
Krugle is developed and delivered using a combination of open-source and proprietary technology. Our search software is based on open-source projects such as Nutch and Lucene from the Apache Software Foundation and the Antlr parser generator.
The USP
Instead of the technologies, Krugle makes an impact with a different approach. Krugle appreciates the fact that code is not everything in programming. It is always more than code, code is only the solution – there is the architecture and design which has developed into the code and the problem statement or the set of requirements, which are typically documented. In open source, there is a chunk of documentation aboug licenses which is as necessary as any other documentation regarding the code. Making this documentation will be made available along with the code will help the developer to decide whether to use the code or not, or sometimes how to use the code. One more feature Krugle talks about is to annotation or tagging by developers and can help tremendously in building a catalogue of the source code.
The doubts are raise only in the business model of Krugle.
Krugle will make money from advertising on its free, public search engine. The company is also planning to create an enterprise edition, due in 2007, to facilitae code-sharing within companies.
It has to be fairly open to the public to ensure the advertising not result in biased searches. There was a similar speculation when Google bought 5% of AOL. But right now is too soon to judge on these things, right now Krugle seems to make lot of sense, especially for developers. Update yourself with Krugle and The Krugle Blog for further developments.
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Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda
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