SurfClipse-- An IDE based context-aware Meta Search Engine (Tool Demo)

Editor's Notes

• #3: Programming exception is a very frequent and a common experience for software programmers or developers. Once an exception is encountered, the developer identifies the target source line that triggers the exception, and attempts to guess what makes the exception to be thrown. In order to dig deeper, the developer often debugs the source code.
• #4: However, the debugging may not reveal the real cause behind the exception or may fail to provide any useful explanation which can be used for the solution of the exception. Thus at some point, the developer needs to look at web for solution or relevant information. Study shows that developers spend about 19% of their programming time in web surfing.
• #5: One might be also interested to collect search query from the IDE. A traditional way for query selection is to copy the exception message, the first line of stack traces, and use it as the search query. - Sometimes, this query may return relevant results; however, there is a great chance that query would not be enough for most of the exceptions. - One may also attempt to develop a custom search query which often needs a deeper understanding about the cause or details of the exception, and it is also time-consuming. Moreover, the developer needs to switch to web browser from the IDE in order to perform the web search.
• #6: In order to solve an exception using web search, they generally follow several steps. The first step is web search using search engines in the web browser. Here, they face several practical challenges: The web browser works in a different context and it does not know the detailed context of the encountered exceptions. Thus it returns results which might be inapplicable for the current programming problem and its context. For example, let us consider NullPointerException, this exception can trigger under hundreds of circumstances, and it is nearly impossible to return useful search results without knowing the detailed context of the exception. This search forces the developer to leave IDE and search in the browser, which is often distracting and time-consuming.
• #7: SurfClipse: An IDE-based context-aware meta search engine.
• #8: One of our important observations about traditional or ad-hoc approaches is that the technical details or the programming context of an encountered exception is not properly used each of which has great potential for problem solving. In this thesis, we exploit such information extensively, and attempt to help in different search related activities. This slide shows some examples. Once an unhandled exception encounters, IDE reports the stack trace. The first line of stack trace generally describes the technical error message. The programming code that triggers the exception is context, it is also called the context code. the technical details and the programming context of the errors and exceptions, and recommend different
• #9: This is our proposed context-aware meta search model for IDE-based recommendation. It has tow modules: Client module (Eclipse plugin) Server module (Web service) Once the developer selects an exception from Error log or console view, the client module captures the error message, stack trace and the context code likely responsible for exception and sends to the computation (server) module. Upon getting the search request, the computation module sends the error message to multiple search engines. We use Google, Bing, Yahoo and the StackOverflow API to collect results and use them to develop the corpus. Once the corpus is developed, we apply our proposed metrics and algorithms to produce a result set that is relevant to the encountered exception. Then the results are sent to the client in the IDE panel. The developer can click each result and can browse page within their working environment.
• #10: So, basically, we are providing four interesting and essential things in this model. A complete IDE-based web search solution Meta search from within the IDE Context-aware search SAAS based search solution, that can be leveraged by any IDE of any platform.
• #11: The proposed model has two working modes–Proactive and Interactive. We design two modes to provide different needs of the developers and to meet demands of different problem solving situations. For example, the proactive mode provides recommendation without any effort. Once an exception occurs, the IDE detects the exception, develops the search query, collect other context details, and initiates the search. Once the results are available, the developer is notified of the results. In case of interactive mode, the developer can choose an error or exception encountered within the IDE, and can start the search through context-menu command. The IDE is responsible to extract the exception details and collect the results from the server. The model also provides a keyword-based interface where developer can perform keyword-based search. During keyword-based search, IDE also recommends a set of suitable keywords representing the current problem context (e.g., exception details).