Using the Web as a Reuse Repository

Software reuse is widely recognized as an effective way of increasing the quality of software systems whilst lowering the effort and time involved in their development. Although most of the basic techniques for software retrieval have been around for a while, third party reuse is still largely a “hit and miss” affair and the promise of large case component marketplaces has so far failed to materialize. One of the key obstacles to systematic reuse has traditionally been the set up and maintenance of up-to-date software repositories. However, the rise of the World Wide Web as a general information repository holds the potential to solve this problem and give rise to a truly ubiquitous library of (open source) software components. This paper surveys reuse repositories on the Web and estimates the amount of software currently available in them. We also briefly discuss how this software can be harvested by means of general purpose web search engines and demonstrate the effectiveness of our implementation of this approach by applying it to reuse examples presented in earlier literature.