How It Works

1. An administrator installs CodeCrawler and configures source code
   repositories to be searched.
   
2. CodeCrawler builds a search index for the source code while analyzing each
   file and extracting important semantic information.
   
3. Developers search the indexed repositories and examine the code from
   within a web browser.

Rationale

Large-scale software development and maintenance presents many challenges to
developers. As the code base grows, so do the difficulties of staying up to date
with the code, finding the right place for implementing new requirements, or
trying to fix existing bugs. In addition, as code size increases, sometimes
documentation does not get updated or is missing altogether, which makes
training new developers difficult and time consuming.

When wandering through the code, developers often use grep utilities to find
a particular piece of code. These utilities let developers search source files
for a match with a regular expression, and while powerful, they have three
disadvantages. First, writing a regular expression for a search necessitates at
least some knowledge about what you are searching for – for example, the
prefix of a variable name or that the variable ends with a number. Second, the
results returned from a grep are all the matches to the given regular expression
and in that respect are all equally relevant. This means a developer might get
hundreds of results and have no idea which one to look at. Third, grep utilities
are part of the operating system or are integrated within an IDE and the results
cannot be viewed from the web. These days, when so many open source projects are
developed over the Internet, searching source code directly from a web browser
seems natural.