How to distinguish between all the outwardly identical modules?

[cwolves]

I'm really starting to think that as a community we need to start
either filtering or better organizing the quickly growing list of
modules that are available for Node.

If a newbie comes in and starts looking for something, or even an
expert JS engineer that needs something new, there are often half-a-
dozen "identical looking" modules to choose from. Take the flow
libraries for instance -- there are currently 18 listed. How is
anyone supposed to know which ones are decent and which ones are
complete hacks full of memory leaks, short of spending hours analyzing
them all?

I think it's great that people are spending so much time innovating
and sharing with Node, but I think that something needs to be done and
I'm just wondering what others' thoughts are.

-Mark

[Marak Squires]

While not a perfect system, checking the author + repo activity + watcher count + fork count is not a bad indicator. Good documentation helps to.

I have a mental list of authors and if I need to make a choice between a few modules, I am probably going to pick the one written by an author I am familiar with. 

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[Mikeal Rogers]

This is a little premature.

You don't want to narrow in on a set of "blessed" modules until the community matures a bit, which it isn't.

-Mikeal

[AJ ONeal]

+1

A library is only as good as it's documentation.

github forks + github followers + most recent commit / activity level are the indicators I use.

Also, if I have a question about a library I'll github message the author.
If they respond and tell me that they aren't maintaining the library, I'll pick a different one.


That said, for flow-control I recommend Futures (because I created it).

AJ ONeal

[Isaac Schlueter]

Whenever a JavaScripter says "My flow control library is the best",
he's usually right.

If you write a flow control library, you'll know what I mean. It's
pretty trivial, and you'll love yours so much you won't even be able
to imagine using any other.

It's like having children. Seems like a lot of pointless busy-work,
and then you do it, probably without meaning or wanting to, and then
suddenly fall so in love, you can't understand why everyone doesn't go
as nuts over this little food-to-poop converter as you do. If you're
not careful, you'll end up writing 3 or 4 more.

--i

[Scott González]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 2:49 PM, AJ ONeal <cool...@gmail.com> wrote:

github forks + github followers + most recent commit / activity level are the indicators I use.

Sorting based on this info could be an interesting feature for search.npmjs.org. We talked about doing that for jQuery's new plugin repository (not yet released).

[Mikeal Rogers]

flow control, templates, and test frameworks.

trivial to write so everyone is opinionated that theirs is the best. 

-Mikeal

[Tim Caswell]

"you can't understand why everyone doesn't go
as nuts over this little food-to-poop converter as you do.  If you're
not careful, you'll end up writing 3 or 4 more."

 Isaac, you are full of wonderful analogies.

[Jeffery Olson]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Isaac Schlueter <i...@izs.me> wrote:

> Whenever a JavaScripter says "My flow control library is the best",
> he's usually right.
>
> If you write a flow control library, you'll know what I mean.  It's
> pretty trivial, and you'll love yours so much you won't even be able
> to imagine using any other.
>
> It's like having children.  Seems like a lot of pointless busy-work,
> and then you do it, probably without meaning or wanting to, and then
> suddenly fall so in love, you can't understand why everyone doesn't go
> as nuts over this little food-to-poop converter as you do.  If you're
> not careful, you'll end up writing 3 or 4 more.

at least the sleepless nights are voluntary, in this case.