CodeWeb

[Amir Michail <amir cs washington edu>]

Hi,

I have been working with Professor David Notkin to develop an
exploratory approach to software reuse at the University of
Washington.  In this work, we introduce a novel web-based system where
browsing plays the dominant role (much in the same way as javadoc and
CVS do on the web today).

Specifically, our tool, CodeWeb, helps developers with three reuse tasks:

(1) selection of a library from among several alternatives

(2) use of a library by considering *existing* user-selected
    application examples that reuse that library

(3) use of multiple libraries in combination in an application

Roughly speaking, this is done by matching components (such as classes
and functions) in various ways *across* different software systems
(such as two different libraries or a library and an application).  By
browsing matched components and their relationships, a developer can
better select, specialize, and integrate software systems.

We would like to validate our tool, CodeWeb.  In particular, we would
like to run CodeWeb on GNOME source code and post the results on
the web.  We hope that you would provide links from your site to this
data so that developers can take advantage of our work.  We would
appreciate any feedback from GNOME developers on how useful our tool
is in practice.

We have a web page with some examples of the kinds of web pages we can
generate that would help with reuse related activities. The page also
has an overview of our techniques and two papers on the subject. The
link is:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/amir/CodeWeb

We would like to help the free software community by building better
code browsing tools. We believe our approach goes beyond current
web-based systems for reuse related activities.  Please let us know if
you are interested in participating in this case study.

Thank you,

Amir Michail and David Notkin
University of Washington