ECS is an open-sourceproject for engineeringsoftware codes and programs, developed at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. ECS was started in order to provide code snippets, and complete programs which can prove useful to engineers, scientists and technologists worldwide. Code snippets in different platforms such as C, C++, Java, MATLAB, PHP, C#, and HTML are being made available through this project. All submitted codes are reviewed to ensure that they run without errors, and only then, they are published. The project uses a unique tagging feature for each code snippet which include a title, brief description about the code, specific instructions for running the code, and the creation date.
Motivation and History
The web is cluttered with snippets of code, which often serve no meaningful purpose. This makes the life of a programmer very difficult, with unreliable codes that do not compile being inserted into large software projects resulting in bugs that go undetected until reported by users. As such, this project aims to provide a comprehensive framework where code snippets are well categorized, and serve the specific function of engineering projects. The attempt made in this project is to be able to organize code snippets by category, and provide an open source framework, which makes it easy for programmers to access a growing, uncluttered database online and use it for the purposes of their own software development efforts. This open-source resource also aims to facilitate the ease of use of snippets for the purposes of education of engineering principles, by providing examples that fit the curricula of engineering schools. The foundations of this project were laid in November 2009, and an intranet effort was launched as a start up point. Later this project was moved to the world wide web to facilitate global access. The project pages are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license, and the project aims to fulfill the GNU Project aims of freedom to run the program, freedom to access the code, freedom to redistribute the program to anyone, and freedom to improve the software,.
