Parsing and Importing Code

Importing code

Once Jess has been installed, you can start the server and begin to import code into the database by executing jess-import. In one terminal, execute the Jess server (where $JESS is the Jess root directory):

cd $JESS
./jess-server.sh

In a second terminal, you can now import a project. Therefore, the source code of the project must be first packed as a tarball. Then you can invoke jess-import to import the project.

cd $JESS
tar -cvzf ProjectName path/to/your/projectCode
jess-import ProjectName

This will upload the tarball to the server, unpack it, parse the code and create a new project named ProjectName and corresponding graph database.

Parsing code without importing

In addition to offering a tool to automatically parse and import code into a graph database (jess-import), Jess provides a tool to parse code and store its intermediate graph representation in a text file. The fuzzy parser can thus be used without the graph database backend, e.g., to provide input for other standalone code analysis tools.

To parse source code in the directory $codeDir, simply invoke jess-parse as follows.

./jess-parse $codeDir

This will create a directory named parsed, which contains two files for each source file: a node file (nodes.csv) and an edge file (edges.csv).