Jarhoo is a good step in a right direction

If you often wonder which jar a particular class comes from, Jarhoo has indexed a number of common distributions of java applications and libraries and allows to do a quick lookup by a name substring or a jar file substring.

Among other applications, it includes BEA Weblogic, so it is sometimes useful for me in troubleshooting classpath issues.

There are some growing pains still:

  • It does not indicate which Service Pack of the product is uses. One assumes the latest
  • It does not allow to add or remove product from a search list. It would have been useful to speed up the search by adding - for example - +product:WLS81
  • There seem to be some sort of double escape of < sign in Jar File Locations entries

An interesting thing is that just from looking at the interface, I can tell it is running Lucene under the hood. The ‘2 seconds’ response time especially is a telling sign.

I wish the project well and I hope that, based on its success, many more mini apps will appear. It is certainly the right direction.

BlogicBlogger Over and Out