Black Duck Refines Code Search

Black Duck's update to its code search tool includes LDAP connectivity and the ability to filter results

By Joab Jackson
Wed, October 26, 2011

IDG News Service — Black Duck Software has revamped its software code engine so that it indexes more quickly and filters the results, the company announced Wednesday.

Black Duck Code Sight 2.0, out now, is also the first version of the software to run on Linux servers, in addition to being able to run on Microsoft Windows servers.

Using Code Sight "is like searching on a regular search engine, but the content and indexing is specialized to code. We parse and index the raw source in code-specific ways to identify things like method definitions and classes," said Jim Berets, Black Duck vice president of product management.

Code Sight indexes all the code that is embedded in version control systems or that is otherwise available on an organization's network. It offers an interface for developers to search for chunks of code that they could consult or reuse in their own projects. The company is marketing the software to organizations with code reuse initiatives put in place to save money and time.

Code Sight can index code within many different types of version control systems, including Git, CVS (Concurrent Versions System), Mercurial, Subversion, AccuRev, IBM's ClearCase and Microsoft's Team Foundation Server. It can be accessed through the Eclipse or the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated developer environments, or with a browser.

This version of the software can index code bases four to six times as quickly as the old version did, according to the company. The improvement came about due to a number of reasons, Berets explained. When the company's developers ported the software from Microsoft Windows to Linux, they optimized the code in a number of places in a way that should make the program run more efficiently. They also migrated to the latest versions of the underlying search software, Apache Lucene and Solr.

The new version also includes filtering technologies. It can filter results by the programming language, file names, method names, fields or a number of other attributes.

The software's ability to manage user roles has also been augmented. The software can now interface with user directories that can be accessed though the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). Users can be assigned roles, and administrators can then set the permission levels to the roles. One member of a group could be designated as the indexer, for instance, and would have greater access to code from other parts of an organization.

The new version comes in three editions. A Free Personal Edition can index up to 500,000 lines of code. The Free Team Edition can index up to 5 million lines of code. The Enterprise Edition, which has no limit on the lines of code it can index, starts at US$9,500. The software is also a component of Black Duck Suite of development management tools.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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