Alan Z. talks about the search for relevant sample code within an expanding EDN.

Searching For Relevant Code

Okay, I couldn't resist the "The Da Veloper Code" pun. However controversial, the book "The Da Vinci Code" is really a mystery novel centered around searching for information that's difficult to find.

Searching for relevant information isn't controversial, or trivial. Finding information that's actually useful to you can be quite time consuming, and often leads to many dead ends (and that's assuming you eventually find what you're looking for, which isn't always the case).

Often, search results bombard you with thousands of hits, and most don't really apply to what you're looking for. The results are "accurate", but not "relevant". To increase relevancy, it's usually necessary to reduce the search scope, giving the search engine hints about what you find valuable. So what does this mean to you, and how can the EMC Developer Network (EDN) help?

In my past articles, I've mentioned that the EDN is evolving, broadening its scope and feature set, and that will result in a lot more content. I've also explained that one of our priorities is to lower the barriers to getting information that helps you get your jobs done. Finding code samples hosted on EDN has been tedious. Code might be in Component Exchange, Sample Code, and other downloads areas, but there was no easy way to search them. You could search the short abstract for each item, but not the code. You would have to read the download descriptions, guess at its applicability, download the file, and see if there was something inside of value to you, if not, repeat the procedure. That's way too much work.

During last November's Software Developers Conference, I showed a couple of slides of a deep EDN code search feature that we were working on. Looking out over the crowd, I could see that it captured their attention, and there were lots of smiles, a very good sign.

Now I'm pleased to announce new functionality that we feel will significantly speed up finding relevant code hosted by EDN... taking a lot of the detective work out of the process.

CodeSearch

So how does this work? We've done an integration using technology supplied by Koders.com to index more than 300,000 lines of code currently in the EDN repositories. You can search for code from the search box found on any of the EDN pages, or you can go directly to the http://codesearch.developer.emc.com page. For example, if you are looking for code containing "Session", there are about 550 results. The results show the file name, the project name (often a zip file), and a few lines of the code. You can further refine the scope of the search to the language you're interested in, and/or to the projects you want searched.

When you click on a file name in the results, you see the search term highlighted in the actual code (with line numbers and color coding!), along with methods and fields for the classes. You can download the file to your computer with a single click, or you can drill down on the project name to present a tree view that allows you go get into any/all of the files in the project structure. Very cool stuff.

Of course, doing this integration required some single sign-on coding to make sure EDN members have access to the codesearch facility. Aashish Patil writes about some of the technical hurdles in his "Off the Beaten Track" article on Encryption Across Programming Languages

Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Developer Centers

Development often bridges products and technologies. As EMC expands the scope of software and technologies, EDN is extending the scope of the products covered. We've reorganized the EDN web site into a home page, that's general to all developers, and have implemented Developer Centers for more focused developer communities.

EDN Developer Centers are gathering places for communities of developers with common interests.

• In these centers, you'll find the resources and content that you need to be successful designing solutions using EMC products and technologies
• Developer centers are great for keeping informed about special events, programs and breaking news. Check out the RSS feeds in each center.
• Centers help bring people together to discuss topics important to the communities

• The Content Management Developer Center contains information of interest to developers working with our Documentum, Captiva, and ApplicationXtender products
• The Resource Management Developer Center is targeted towards our members who develop using Smarts , Control Center and nLayers

Developer Support

Most EDN members know the EMC Product Support team and the great job they do with product related technical issues. However, their responsibility does not cover customizations you do for your applications. Who do developers turn to for help with their customizations? Not many people know about the EMC Developer Support for Content Management team, who are there to help customers implement customized solutions. The team is comprised of Content Management developers who build, or help you build parts of solutions. They provide ah-hoc remote assistance in coding, customization and integration over a wide range of Content Management products and technologies.

The Developer Support team often has unique insights into the development process and how to avoid problems. They've worked with EDN behind the scenes for a long time, and now it's time to let more people know about them. They are now providing whitepapers, code samples, articles and other material to EDN so that our member can leverage their experience. Check out the papers on DFC Session Management from the client application perspective, and Content Server Method Server Essentials. It's nice to shine a little light onto developers who spend much of their time "in the trenches" with our customers.

An Embeddable Platform

Every once in a while, we come across products that are targeted squarely at developers. One such product is the EMC Documentum Content Server OEM Edition. It is a developer platform that combines repository, database and indexing services into an installable package, allowing you to add Content Management to your turnkey products.

The whitepaper, An Embeddable Platform for Rapid Application Development introduces the new product, and is a great landscape overview for anyone new to Content Management. In the audio interview, Introducing Documentum Content Server OEM Edition, Matt Coblentz discusses the similarities and differences of the OEM and Enterprise Editions of Content Server, and how developers can leverage the platform.

SDC '07

The Software Developer Conference (SDC) at EMC World is coming up soon, May 21-27 in Orlando Florida.

Essentially, the SDC is a physical instantiation of the virtual online EDN community. You get to meet people whose names you've seen on articles or in forum discussions. You can have dinner with EMC engineers, and drinks with product managers. Attend seminars, panel discussions, keynotes, receptions, and the very entertaining Developer Challenge. Or you can just take some time to relax in the SDC lounge.

Your registration includes the SDC, Momentum, and EMC Technology Summit (ETS) conferences, so there's a lot to do and see.

I'll be presenting a session about the EDN and leading a focus group about upcoming EDN features. If you're interested in the focus group, please contact me at edn_editor @ emc.com.

What do you think?

We want all members to be able to comment on all areas of EDN content. If you're logged into EDN, you can generally click on a "Comment" link at the bottom of a page, but stay tuned, we've got more ways for you to share with the community coming soon.

Don't be shy, it's time for you to speak up and contribute. There's great value in sharing information that you've found. It's no mystery.

Alan Z.

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