Motivation

Developers often consult online tutorials and message boards to find solutions to their programming issues. Among the various online resources, Question & Answer websites have gained striking popularity. This is no wonder if we consider, for example, the case of Stack Overflow: In this Q&A service more than 92% questions on expert topics are answered in a median time of 11 minutes.

This new important resource has scarcely been acknowledged by any Integrated Development Environment (IDE). In fact, even though developers spend a large part of their working time in IDEs, and the usage of Q&A services has dramatically increased, developers still have to use these websites from external applications, which require context switches that break the programming flow.

Seahawk is an Eclipse plugin to integrate the Stack Overflow crowd knowledge within the IDE. It allows developers to seamlessly access Stack Overflow data, thus obtaining answers without switching the context. It allows users to retrieve Q&A from Stack Overflow, link relevant discussions to any source code in Eclipse, and attach explanative comments to the links.

Features