CodeCatch: Extracting Source Code Snippets from Online Sources

Nowadays, developers rely on online sources to find example snippets that address the programming problems they are trying to solve. However, contemporary API usage mining methods are not suitable for locating easily reusable snippets, as they provide usage examples for specific APIs, thus requiring the developer to know which library to use beforehand. On the other hand, the approaches that retrieve snippets from online sources usually output a list of examples, without aiding the developer to distinguish among different implementations and without offering any insight on the quality and the reusability of the proposed snippets. In this work, we present CodeCatch, a system that receives queries in natural language and extracts snippets from multiple online sources. The snippets are assessed both for their quality and for their usefulness/preference by the developers, while they are also clustered according to their API calls to allow the developer to select among the different implementations. Preliminary evaluation of CodeCatch in a set of indicative programming problems indicates that it can be a useful tool for the developer.