8/32  

Search Indexing of Smalltalk image

Mentor: Aik-Siong Koh
Second mentor: Ian Chai
Level: Intermediate
Invited students: Chow Zheng Wei
Students interested: Chow Zheng Wei(very), Marcus Ihlar, Dhinnesh Jeevan

Description

All Smalltalk development environments can now search for implementors, senders or strings using brute force. The results are usually just listed alphabetically. This project will use search technology to index and page rank all the packages, classes, methods and comments in the image. Search results will be returned quickly and ranked intelligently. It will be a Search Engine for Smalltalk in Smalltalk. A search browser will be created to accept search strings and return columns of hits for packages, classes, methods and comments listed according to their page ranks. Time permitting, an autocompletition capability will be implemented to suggest relevant methods for code writing. The code will be made portable to all Smalltalk dialects.

Technical Details

Three videos on the draft of the search engine have been made and below are the links:

The Anatomy of a Search Engine http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Benefits to the Student

The student will learn the important areas of search technology and object oriented programming. The student will experience creating something that is immediately useful to all Smalltalk programmers.

Benefits to the Community

Fast and intelligent search of Smalltalk code will help the community advance Smalltalk development even faster. Additional programming capabilities can be built on top of the search capabillities.




Updated: 10.4.2012