Codetrail: Connecting source code and web resources

Abstract

When faced with the need for documentation, examples, bug fixes, error descriptions, code snippets, workarounds, templates, patterns, or advice, software developers frequently turn to their web browser. Web resources both organized and authoritative as well as informal and community-driven are heavily used by developers. The time and attention devoted to finding (or re-finding) and navigating these sites is significant. We present Codetrail, a system that demonstrates how the developer's use of web resources can be improved by connecting the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and the Firefox web browser. Codetrail uses a communication channel and shared data model between these applications to implement a variety of integrative tools. By combining information previously available only to the IDE or the web browser alone (such as editing history, code contents, and recent browsing), Codetrail can automate previously manual tasks and enable new interactions that exploit the marriage of data and functionality from Firefox and Eclipse. Just as the IDE will change the contents of peripheral views to focus on the particular code or task with which the developer is engaged, so, too, the web browser can be focused on the developer's current context and task.2

Understanding the impact of support for iteration on code search

“…The insight behind these approaches is that the context of the developer (e.g., the project they are working on) can determine, in part, some initial queries. The typical approach is to use names from the user's opened project (e.g., method names and class names) [3], [40], [131] as well as certain structural properties in the project (e.g., method signatures and supertypes) [51] to automatically construct a query.…”

“…Further, while some approaches rely on the programmer to select code in their project to initiate a query [51], some approaches will automatically push results to the programmer as the programmer is writing [3], [40], [131].…”

“…Some, for instance, have been investigating how to support more expressive queries (e.g., searching by test case or method signatures) that afford more precise matching of code compared to keywords (e.g., [4], [15], [54], [65], [71], [82], [91], [110], [122], [142]). Others have investigated new matching and ranking algorithms (e.g., ranking code higher with method names or class names matching the keywords) so that more results presumed to better match the topic described by the keywords are returned and appear towards the top of the list (e.g., [12], [28], [40], [44], [51], [66], [67], [76], [131]). …”

A Content Assist based Approach for Providing Rationale of Method Change for Object Oriented Programming

“…Although not focused on providing reason of code change to developer, Codetrail by Goldman et al [16] established connection between IDE and artifacts such as documentation, bug fixes and error descriptions available in web. Begel et al [3] created CodeBook framework that mined software repositories relying on the concept of Bridge Framework.…”

Holistic recommender systems for software engineering

“…For instance, Goldman and Miller presented Codetrail [GM09], a tool that uses a communication channel and shared data model between the IDE and the web browser to combine information gathered from the two (i.e., editing history, code contents, and recent browsing). Codetrail makes the web browser an additional IDE view that enables additional features like bookmarking of web resources in the resources code from both the IDE and the web browser, and automatic documentation browsing in the web browser by synching with the current element under the cursor in the IDE.…”