ONJava.com: Using Lucene to Search Java Source Code

ONJava.com: Using Lucene to Search Java Source Code: "Using Lucene to Search Java Source Code
by Renuka Sindhgatta
01/18/2006

Several websites allow the software development community to share information by publishing developer guidelines, white papers, FAQs, and source code. As the information content grows, with several developers contributing to the repository, websites provide search engines to search all of the information present on the site. While the search engines do a very good job in retrieving text documents, they severely constrain a developer when searching source code. Search engines consider source code files as plain text documents and hence and are no different from a sophisticated grep tool capable of handling large source files.

In this article I propose the approach of using Lucene, the Java-based open source search engine, to search source code by extracting and indexing relevant source code elements. I restrict the search to Java source code only. However, extending the search to any other programming language's source code should not be very different."