Software development projects produce a large number of artifacts, including source code, documentation, bug reports, e-mail, newsgroup articles, and version information. The information in these artifacts can be helpful to a software developer trying to perform a task, such as adding a new feature, to a system. Unfortunately, it is often difficult for a software developer to locate the right information amongst the huge amount of data stored.

Hipikat is a tool intended to solve this problem. Hipikat recommends relevant software development artifacts based on the context in which a developer requests help from Hipikat.

Hipikat is an eclipse plug-in. Eclipse is billed as an open-source IDE project based upon development at IBM. But really, there is much more going on with Eclipse than open source. First, it is framework for tooling of all types, not just IDEs. Second the architecture is more open than others I've seen. That seems much more significant than the open source aspect because diverse groups are getting tools working on Eclipse -- more important -- the tools are working together.

I saw Hipikat demonstration at OOPSLA last week & was impressed not only with the vision of the authors, but the senergy with other Eclipse developments.

Hipikat appears to be named after a  Wolof (West African) word meaning something like "eyes open.", according to an article in Atlantic.

Wow. One of the best description of Emacs was from jwz: "application platform". Emacs has not just email, netnews, programming languages frontends, rolodex, hypertext help system, complete documentation, but also computer algebra system (calc), games and its own (sane) windowing system. Eclipse is becoming the emacs of the 21st century.

TODO: resurrect infodoc (which used to cost $1000 despite being GPL - but the company went bust and it's now at sourceforge). Compare infodoc, Acme/wily, Eclipse, IDEA, Whisker and Star Browser.

9:21:29 AM  #