CodeSnippets Plug-in to Eclipse: Introducing Web 2.0 Tagging to Improve Software Developer Recall

Putting aside the marketing hype of Web2.0, a few central themes have emerged: user generated content, software to enable users (not restrict them), building a community and instant feedback. Many of these concepts can equally apply to rich client applications and a focus on software development teams. The initial motivation for Code Snippets was to fulfill the personal needs of software developers. At times, they need to reuse the same coding constructs, library access, method calls, and Web services. Recalling (or finding) this information is sometimes difficult. Drawing on similar success as online tagging libraries like del.icio.us and flickr.com, we have developed an Eclipse plug-in called CodeSnippets that allows software teams to document, store, share and search communal code to help answer the question, "How do I code that? ".