GrepCode Is Down! What's Next?

GrepCode.com is down!

Its been 3+ months, GrepCode.com is throwing an HTTP 503 Service Unavailable error. I think now it's safe to assume that it is permanently down. No doubt that it was an awesome tool for developers. Personally, I have used this tool several times while taking references of various open source projects. It's been online since 2008 obviously for good reasons.

So what do we do now? We still have that requirement, where we want to look up open source code online. Github is one alternative, as most of the open source projects are either fully maintained there or have their mirrors available. But, Github doesn't support IDE-like navigation. And that's a big productivity issue!

To solve this purpose, and bring out a filler for GrepCode, we launched zGrepCode.com!

zGrepCode is your helper to navigate open source code. I and my team are working hard to bring an IDE-like experience to navigate the open source projects online. Classes are linked internally across projects to make navigation easy. For example, see the below image; classes like Comparable and Object are linked to their respective source.

The other useful part is navigating within a class using the "Outline" section. It links all methods within a class and its subclasses to help you traverse a lengthy class, like Java's Hashmap, for example.

We have added some major open source projects, and are continuously onboarding more projects every week! We have just started, and there is a long way to go. We believe that there is one thing that won't ever change in this entire journey, and that is our intention to help the open source community. 

I do not want to make this post a product review article. So I will end here with an invitation for all DZone reads to go and try out zGrepCode, and comment below that how it can be more helpful to you.