I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal
Developers of code have always been fairly open with their tips and tricks. New advancements in the websphere come fast and many of them come from the open source community. Led by people like Linus Torvalds, the original author of Linux, the open source ommunity has rewritten many of the most popular proprietary applications on the market and made them freely available to the world, asking only that if they don’t sell the code you don’t turn around and sell the code as well.
This was the foundation for the web. Apache, the most popular web server in use, is a product of the open source community. Recently, due to a large pool of code to draw upon and the entry into the open source community of many proprietary products we have been seeing a lot of advancements coming at a more rapid rate than ever. OpenOffice.org, a project for replacing Microsoft Office, Eclipse, a project supposedly named because they were going to “eclipse†Sun and a list almost as long as the postings on SourceForge.net (a popular site for open source software) have emerged.
This is changing the way people write code. Programmers today are often charged with assembling and integrating code more than they are actually writing new code. Many organizations have seen that by using code repositories online and in some cases searchable is more efficient than writing new code. In many cases, software developers and architects spend more time finding, downloading and evaluating available code than anything else.
Some programmers sell their code, but many just post it online giving back to the community that helped them find code they have been using and in some cases learn their craft. Finding the appropriate code for a given task and making sure that the licensing and documentation is taken care of can be a tough task. This is where a new type of search engine comes into play. Koders.com currently offers over 225,000,000 lines of code for languages including PHP, Python, SQL and many others. Krugle is another search engine that offers much more information on code although it is currently in beta. If you would rather pay for your ability to search code you can sign up for the protexIP/OnDemand service with Black Duck. Anyone who will be writing a lot of code should get to know all their options for trolling around for code.