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Code-centric search tool strives to reduce Java development time

IBM's jCentral among the first of a new wave of targeted search engines

By Mariva H. Aviram, JavaWorld.com, 06/01/98

If you've spent hours, days, or even weeks or months searching for an obscure piece of Java-related information or a code example, you probably understand the frustration that such a quest involves. To find what you're looking for, you might try a number of Java informational sites, perhaps browsing manually through articles and archives, topic by topic. You scan the subject lines of scores of Usenet newsgroup articles. You peruse Java code directories, which contain dozens of code examples for just about everything but what you actually need. After plugging in as many keywords (and NOT-keywords) you can think of, you slog through myriad pages of general-purpose search engine results. You even resort to printed materials: books, magazines, old notes -- anything that might offer solutions to your Java development problems. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you eventually find what you're looking for. But often you don't. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of development is knowing that some piece of necessary information is out there, but not knowing how to find it.

Your efforts to find Java resources may now reap more rewards -- and require less time. IBM jCentral, announced and showcased at the recent JavaOne Java developer conference in San Francisco, is an information-specific search engine for Java resources. In other words, jCentral is a search tool that finds only Java resources. And it finds all types of Java resources, including source code, JavaBeans, applets, and Java-related newsgroup articles and Web sites.

The jCentral Power search
(Click image for full-size view)

Once the jCentral technology finds code in applets, beans, source code files, and newsgroup articles, it extracts the salient features of the code for indexing purposes. For example, when crawling a Java applet, jCentral analyzes the embedding HTML page and the applet class file to obtain information about the applet, such as all of its invoked methods. The information is subsequently indexed so that users can issue queries to find, say, all the Java applets that make a network connection by invoking methods from the java.net.socket class, or all the applets that contain a particular button, or a slider bar. Developers can use this specific code-searching technique on class methods, strings, and other snippets of useful Java code.

Because it is optimized for running Java-specific searches, jCentral represents an important new tool for the Java community. Internet development community leaders, such as the attendees of the seventh World Wide Web Consortium Conference in Australia, are voicing concerns about the growing ineffectiveness of monolithic search engines when used for specific purposes. As the Internet grows, the available information associated with any given keyword grows accordingly, which leads to general-purpose search engines becoming clogged with massive amounts of data -- data that is often irrelevant and useless to users. For instance, an English-only search for "Java" through Alta Vista (Digital Equipment Corp.'s popular general-purpose Internetwide search tool) uncovers more than 800,000 documents.

 

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