Searching for UI

Over the last few months, I have been studying code search. A beautiful application of Code Search is the work done by Steven P. Reiss of Brown University on searching for user interfaces. He searches for the UI structure and APIs using Java and Swing/AWT knowledge. Further, he applies some transformations to avoid duplicates and score the search results. Basic idea is to extract UI code from the search results (from Ohloh, GitHub, etc) and build a new class file with standard identifier naming conventions. More transformations are applied to clean the code. For example, data providers are replaced with dummy providers. This transformed code is made compilable and then scored. Since the code is compilable, the user interfaces can now be shown as search results! What a beauty! Now, you can search for user interfaces and the results can be viewed as user interface snapshots. A very neat idea, well experimented. He finds 79 relevant usable results for a query “name mail phone jlist” query. The system is available for playing around at http://conifer.cs.brown.edu:8180/S6Search/s6search.html.