CLAN: Closely reLated ApplicatioNs

Although popular text search engines allow users to retrieve similar web pages, source code search engines do not have this feature. Knowing similarity between applications plays an important role in improving understanding and assessing reusability of these applications, rapid prototyping, and discovering code theft and plagiarism. However, detecting similar applications is a notoriously difficult problem, since it implies that similar high-level requirements and their low-level implementations can be detected and matched automatically for different applications. We present our approach for automatically detecting Closely reLated ApplicatioNs (CLAN) for a given Java application. CLAN compares applications based on the calls they make to the standard Java Application Programming Interface (API). Our idea is that similar applications will make similar API calls. CLAN is publicly available via a standard web browser; users may view similar applications as well as the API calls they share.