Krugle ships 2.0 version of code search engine

Krugle shipped on Tuesday an upgrade of its enterprise code search appliance for software development teams that is designed to offer improved scalability and search accuracy.

Krugle is also now offering prospective customers the ability to evaluate the product on VMware before purchasing it.

Krugle Enterprise 2.0 is sold as an appliance and can be configured to work with a variety of software change management systems, including ClearCase, Perforce, Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, Subversion, and others, according to Krugle. It also can crawl flat-file systems and code archives, according to the company, based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Results can be viewed through a Web browser, but Krugle also offers support for searching directly from the Eclipse IDE. There is an application programming interface for creating other integrations as well. "We have a first-class integration with Eclipse, and the next cab off the ramp will be [Microsoft's] Visual Studio," said Matt Graney, senior director of product management.

Michael Coté, an analyst with RedMonk, said Tuesday that it is important for software such as Krugle to be tightly linked with a developer's core environment.

"If it can't be crammed into the IDE, the experience that's in front of the software developer every hour of the day, I think it won't get the face time it needs to be worth it," Coté said. "As an example, project management software that doesn't have a touch-point in IDEs tends to only be looked at by managers, and then developers have no idea about the overall project status."

However, it may in fact be easier to scan code results in a browser window, according to Graney. "From a real-estate point of view, Eclipse is a busy sort of environment," he said.

Users can use Krugle to search code repositories in a variety of ways, such as for a specific project, or solely for the comments that developers place with code upon check-in. The engine can also recognize various code features, such as function calls and class definitions.

It supports more than 40 languages, according to the company. There is also some reporting capability built into the product, such as a "heat map" function that provides a snapshot of activity levels among various projects.

"We've been really impressed with it," said Patrick Hendry, CEO of Thuridion, a software consulting company and early beta user of the 2.0 release. "It definitely saves us time. We haven't sat down and quantified how much we're saving into dollars, but clearly that's happened."

Hendry's company is aligned with Visual Studio, not Eclipse. It hasn't yet built an integration with Krugle, but may down the road if it becomes a paying customer, Hendry said. "We'll probably take a look at that. It's not a must-have, but it would probably be nice to have."

The Scotts Valley, Calif., company mostly creates software for publishers who then sell it, Hendry said. Thuridion has "a large body of code" at any given time -- some 3 million to 4 million lines of code, excluding comment documents, he said.

Thuridion "very briefly" considered other vendors but felt Krugle returned better results, he said.

Subscription pricing typically begins at about $25,000 per year and scales up depending on the size of the code base, the number of users, and how often the code base is crawled.

Krugle was formed in October 2005. Its competitors include Koders and Google. The company also runs a free site, www.krugle.org, which can be used to search more than 2 billion lines of open source code. The krugle.org index can also be accessed through the enterprise product.