Krugle shipped on Tuesday an upgrade of its enterprise code search appliance for software development teams that is designed to offer improved scalability and search accuracy.

Krugle is also now offering prospective customers the ability to evaluate the product on VMware before purchasing it.

Krugle Enterprise 2.0 is sold as an appliance and can be configured to work with a variety of software change management (SCM) systems, including ClearCase, Perforce, Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, Subversion and others, according to Krugle. It also can crawl flat-file systems and code archives, according to the company, based in Menlo Park, California.

Results can be viewed through a Web browser, but Krugle also offers support for searching directly from the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE). There is an application programming interface for creating other integrations as well. "We have a first-class integration with Eclipse, and the next cab off the ramp will be [Microsoft's] Visual Studio," said Matt Graney, senior director of product management.

Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk, said Tuesday that it is important for software like Krugle to be tightly linked with a developer's core environment.

"If it can't be crammed into the IDE, the experience that's in front of the software developer every hour of the day, I think it won't get the face time it needs to be worth it," Coté said. "As an example, project management software that doesn't have a touch-point in IDEs tends to only be looked at by managers, and then developers have no idea about the overall project status."

However, it may in fact be easier to scan code results in a browser window, according to Graney. "From a real-estate point of view, Eclipse is a busy sort of environment," he said.

Users can use Krugle to search code repositories in a variety of ways, such as for a specific project, or solely for the comments that developers place with code upon check-in. The engine can also recognize various code features, such as function calls and class definitions.

It supports more than 40 languages, according to the company. There is also some reporting capability built into the product, such as a "heat map" function that provides a snapshot of activity levels among various projects.

"We've been really impressed with it," said Patrick Hendry, CEO of Thuridion, a software consulting company and early beta user of the 2.0 release. "It definitely saves us time. We haven't sat down and quantified how much we're saving into dollars, but clearly that's happened."