Krugle rocks 1
Ok, if you haven’t heard of Krugle yet and you do any kind of programming you should read this.
No, I don’t work for them (although they seem like a cool company for sure), but I have been using their service for a little while and have been very impressed. So what is Krugle anyways? Krugle is an online index of Open Source Software source code that is searchable.
How is this different from just plain google? First, it has indexed the source by language and by project so if you know what language you are searching for that eliminates a lot right off the bat, plus if you know the project (or projects) you expect to find your source in then that narrows it down quite a bit more. Plus you can also choose whether you want to search just class files or other files within a given project (very handy for html templates and the like).
Alright, but how is this different from Google’s Code Search? Google’s Code Search also allows you to search via language type, but not really project. Additionally Krugle’s search interface is more geared towards exploration, with all of the class files listed cleanly and once you drill down you haven’t lost your search results and can easily build up a shopping cart of classes you are investigating. Another cool thing they did is to actually show you the tree of the project that you are in once you are viewing the class file so you can navigate around the rest of the project easily.
About the only thing I would like to see them add would be a source cross-reference so that I could easily navigate to other classes defined within a class-file. But I could see how that type of thing would get tricky very quickly with all of the different languages they are supporting.
So far I’ve had Krugle save me 3 or 4 times and Google’s Code Search only once, so I’ll definitely head back to Krugle first (now if I could only remember the name ;-).
