CrossLanguageSpotter: a library for detecting relations in polyglot frameworks

Nowadays, most of the web frameworks are developed using different programming languages, both for server and client side programmes. The typical scenario includes a general purpose language (e.g. Ruby, Python, Java) used together with different specialized languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript and SQL. All the artifacts are connected via different types of relations, most of which depend on the adopted framework. These cross-language relations are normally not captured by tools which require the developer to learn and to remember those associations in order to understand and maintain the application. This paper describes a library for detecting cross-language relations in polyglot frameworks. The library has been developed to be modular and to be easily integrated in existing IDEs. The library is publicly available at http://github.com/CrossLanguageProject/crosslanguagespotter