I want a Firefox Plugin that recognizes that the page I’m looking at contains Java, does syntax highlighting and, most of all, inserts links to the classes and methods referenced in the code. The plugin (or a server it can ask) should know where the source code of a class like org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory can be found.
First I thought that such a plugin would need (or could at least profit from) sem***ic web technologies (no dirty words on this blog, please), but it probably wouldn’t. All we need is a global registry that maps package names to the URLs of the web interfaces of the respective source repositories. (Maybe Google Code Search could be such a repository, but its results are often pretty bad.) The plugin would also have to include a reasonably good Java parser, and maybe a heuristic to distinguish betweeen Java and non-Java text.
Why would I want such a thing? Well, I often have to dig through the code of some open source library in order to understand a bug, or just to figure out what I can do with it, and how, because the documentation is incomplete or wrong. Usually I create an Eclipse project and import the code from the source repository, but that’s quite a lot of overhead if I just need to browse the code for ten minutes or so. On the other hand, digging through source code on web pages, without the help of links between the pages, is just a nuisance.
And wouldn’t it just be so cool to have one of the most important features of an IDE as a browser plugin, enhanced by the power of the world wide web?
P.S.: Or maybe I don’t want a browser plugin – maybe I just want Google to put some more effort into Code Search? Come on, guys, you’ve got all it takes – the global repository, the parsers, the heuristics…