Go OpenGrok

To me, browsing a codebase until now always required downloading it and setting it up in an IDE. But as good as they are as a development environment, they are quite cumbersome (some might prefer to say they are an overkill) when it comes to browsing code, especially one that you are not familiar with. Add to this the need to have them and the codebase everywhere and everytime you want to browse... and all I wanted was to browse a set of code!

The idea of a web based source browser instantly appealed to me. I heard about OpenGrok in one of the sessions at the Sun Techdays and tried it out right away. OpenGrok is a web based source browser with cross referencing and freetext search. All that I need to do is to configure the path of the codebase and run OpenGrok. OpenGrok generates a war that I dump into tomcat and that's all! I can now search the code, click on the variables and methods to check their definitions and do all that's in the scope of code browsing. Moreover, I can just set it up on one box and access it from anywhere on the network.

OpenGrok uses exuberant Ctags and lucene, the java based search and indexing library to get the job done. It's an easy-to-use code browsing tool... try it out!

-Ashish.