AllTheCode is a new search engine designed to help you locate useful source code from around the web. AllTheCode joins an already crowded field that seems increasingly dominated by Google Code Search, but AllTheCode offers a few nice touches that set it apart.

AllTheCode is currently listed as alpha and at the moment it only returns results in Java. AllTheCode claims that its results are rated by frequency of use, however I couldn’t find any info on whether that means how often the entire files is used or whether that is broken down further by function or included lib.

In addition to only returning Java results, AllTheCode doesn’t support regular expressions which is a shame since that is the only way to effectively search through code in my opinion. Straight keyword searches are going to return much more “junk” than something you can filter with complex regular expressions.

On the brighter side, AllTheCode is much better at displaying code than other engines I’ve used, including Google Code Search. Results pages are displayed with the first ten or so lines of code and then a link. Clicking the link will display the code with syntax highlighting right in your browser. If the code is what you’re looking for, you can then download the remote file.

The preview is handy and saves you from having to download the file right away. This way you can browse through the code, see if it actually does what you’re looking to do and then download it.

One of the really nice things about Google Code Search is that it displays the license that the code is released under right along side each search result (or at least when it can parse out a license, which is fairly often). Currently AllTheCode doesn’t offer such functionality, but hopefully that’ll be added in the future.

The site performed well, searching was fast and code previews were quick as well. A couple of times the code previews were slightly mangled by character set issues, but that could also be my browser settings.

I’m not a Java programmer so I can’t vouch for the quality of the results returned, but a few quick scans for “strcmp” and other common functionalities returned relevant results. That is, the engine found implementations and functions named strcmp, whether or not they were good Java implementations isn’t something I feel qualified to judge.

As with any niche search field, the more the merrier and while AllTheCode still has a ways to go, it’s definitely worth adding to your toolkit if you’re a Java programmer. If Java isn’t for you, check back in a little while, AllTheCode promises support for more languages is coming soon.