Federated Search for Open Source Software Reuse

Source code search engines assist the software development process by providing a way of searching for free source code in code repositories. Although their use is rather straightforward, there exist a few of them and the differences in the way they index and provide access to their assets require considerable time and effort from the programmer to use them. In this paper, we present a federated open source code search engine that simultaneously asks, in real time, existing open source code search engine sites and detail the way we overcome the integration obstacles, by combining provided APIs, browser automation and web content extraction techniques.