New JavaScript / jQuery Site

[JangoSteve]

Hi all,

I wanted to reach out to the a2div group to see if anyone working on
opensource javascript would like to help provide feedback for a new
site I built.

The site was built out of frustration with plugins.jquery.com, which
I'm sure anyone who's tried to use it can relate. It's a place to host
the distributable packages for any javascript project, whether it be a
framework, library, jquery plugin, or whatever. If you're familiar
with gemcutter / rubygems.org, it's a lot like that except for
javascript. The site is ready for public beta, but I wanted to get a
few people to privately beta test it before officially launching it.

Anyway, if you'd like to check it out, please respond here or get a
hold of me. The site is http://jspkg.com. Any and all feedback
welcome!

-Steve
@jangosteve

[Jeff Hill]

Steve,

I was able to create an account on my own. Do I need you to do
anything at this point?
I'd like to show this to my team at Cengage if you don't mind. (About
a dozen people.)

Best,

Jeff Hill

[Trek Glowacki]

Not a criticism, but there's already so many of these out there and the competition is keep any single one from gaining tractions which I find frustrating coming from a community (Ruby) that sometimes feels like it has a hive mind.

Was there a particular goal in making another one?

The two already semi-big ones I've been using this year:

http://ender.no.de/ from @ded, it piggybacks on npm by adding an 'ender' tag for
http://www.getbpm.org/ which came out of frustrations @wycats had making sproutcore, is also a fork for the rubygems code
and then, of course, if you're using Ruby or Rails anything Sprockets based (https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets). My least favorite despite doing almost entirely Ruby development.

-t

On Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Jeff Hill wrote:

> Steve,
>
> I was able to create an account on my own. Do I need you to do
> anything at this point?
> I'd like to show this to my team at Cengage if you don't mind. (About
> a dozen people.)
>
> Best,
>
> Jeff Hill
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 12:55 PM, JangoSteve <st...@alfajango.com (mailto:st...@alfajango.com)> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I wanted to reach out to the a2div group to see if anyone working on
> > opensource javascript would like to help provide feedback for a new
> > site I built.
> >

> > The site was built out of frustration with plugins.jquery.com (http://plugins.jquery.com), which

> > I'm sure anyone who's tried to use it can relate. It's a place to host
> > the distributable packages for any javascript project, whether it be a
> > framework, library, jquery plugin, or whatever. If you're familiar

> > with gemcutter / rubygems.org (http://rubygems.org), it's a lot like that except for

[Steve Schwartz]

Hey awesome, yeah go for it! But no promises on site speed, it's currently on a free heroku account which I plan to upgrade before actually launching.

You should be able to just upload a new javascript project if you have one, or check out the existing projects from the front page otherwise.

On the project pages, there is basic info about the project, the ability to download the package, and view live demos.

-- Steve Schwartz

On Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Jeff Hill wrote:

[Steve Schwartz]

There are a few sites that kinda have related purposes, but with completely different solutions. A quick list:

http://plugins.jquery.com

http://www.jqueryplugins.com/

http://www.cdnjs.com/

http://ender.no.de/

http://npmjs.org/

http://www.getbpm.org/

It was the crappiness of plugins.jquery that led me to build this; it is painful to use, requires quite a few steps to upload a new project or a new release for an existing project, and it makes searching and discovering nearly impossible. It doesn't help you determine how popular or well-maintained any given project is. It has bugs that take forever to get fixed, and it's saturated with spam. And finally, it's jquery plugins *only*.

jqueryplugins is more of just a directory site. You can't actually download anything from there, it just links you to the various places. Again, it's jquery plugins only.

cdnjs probably comes closest in similarity. However, there's no way to directly download javascript projects, you're supposed to just hotlink to their CDN (I plan on making this functionality optional on jspkg, but right now, it's just downloads). To add a project to cdnjs, you're supposed to fork the code, add your project, and create a pull request. So, it's not the easiest when it comes to maintaining a js project, especially if you have a project that requires supporting stylesheets, images, etc. And it doesn't do much for tracking versions.

ender, npmjs, and getbpm are all command-line utilities for installing (and ender allows searching) javscript projects. This is great for command-line people, but I'm guessing the vast majority of front-end javascript developers are not command-line people. I shouldn't have to install ruby, node, or whatever else on my machine to use some JS project in my app! Just let me download the friggin file and put it in my app. (Now I happen to have all of these installed anyway, but I still think that's a huge barrier for adoption from most font-end JS developers.)

jspkg does have an API (though not finalized), so creating a command line interface should be trivially easy, but initially I wanted a really smooth, simple web interface to cater to everyone. In fact, it would be nice to make jspkg integrate directly with npm or ender at some point.

And finally, none of these do much in terms of allowing you to find a project based on what you need. The vast majority of the time, I think, hmm I need a plugin that does ajax tabs, what is the most widely-adopted plugin that does that? As of right now, google is about the only place I can go to try to figure that out.

-- Steve Schwartz

[Les Orchard]

On Mon Dec 5 14:22:46 2011, Steve Schwartz wrote:
> There are a few sites that kinda have related purposes, but with
> completely different solutions. A quick list:
>
> http://plugins.jquery.com
> http://www.jqueryplugins.com/
> http://www.cdnjs.com/
> http://ender.no.de/
> http://npmjs.org/
> http://www.getbpm.org/

Not to pile on overmuch, but years ago there was also this from Perl
enthusiasts:

http://openjsan.org/

These things have had a mixed history, so it might be interesting to see
where they went wrong in terms of adoption

--
m...@lmorchard.com
http://decafbad.com
{web,mad,computer} scientist

[Steve Schwartz]

Awesome, I hadn't heard of that (perhaps that's partially the problem). I took a look at openjsan, and it seem like there are a lot of barriers to adoption for the site. It looks very unpolished, and thus very uninviting, especially to a group that is comprised mostly of *front-end* developers.

I couldn't figure out how you actually upload a project to the site. I looked through the FAQ and noticed it mentioned the "JavaScript Authors Upload Server (JAUSE)". I looked around a bit more and still could not find that, so I still do not know how to actually add a project to the site.

Looking a bit more, I noticed you have to structure your JS distribution the jsan way in order to get it working with the site, including using a META.yml file, which seems odd for javascript packages.

I looked then to the "Contribute" link, thinking maybe that was it, but was greeted with some strange CGI server error text.

Giving up on that, I started browsing some of the libraries listed on the site, and came across a bunch of 403 errors, and also couldn't make heads nor tails of most of the distributions.

Other than all that, from reading the FAQ, it sounds like that person experienced a lot of the same pains I had, but perhaps they just weren't as far along with the site. So that seems like good validation of the pain at least!

My running hypothesis is that barrier to adoption can make or break a site like this, which is why I'm trying my hardest to make it as simple as possible to add existing projects without extra work.

-- Steve Schwartz

[Thomas Hunter ][]

Hey Steve,

Does jspkg handle hunting down dependencies for the user?

If I can drop to a command line and do "jspkg install awesome-library" and have all dependencies downloaded and setup for me, that would be very badass.

[Steve Schwartz]

Not yet, but absolutely that's one of the things I want to do!

I built in the functionality to understand dependencies, because I plan on doing that eventually. So, for example, if you check out the EasyTabs page (http://jspkg.com/projects/easytabs), you'll notice that it lists each dependency, optional dependency, and test dependency. If any of those projects were also on the site, it actually links to them instead of just listing them.

I'd like to add the ability to download "just this package" or "this package and dependencies", and along with that would come the ability to do the same with the API.

-- Steve Schwartz

[Mike Behnke]

It's a cool idea, and I'm not too worried about the copy-cat sites (better ideas will naturally rise.)  My fear is that soon (within weeks I think, the current site has been taken down) jQuery will be re-launching plugins.jquery.com with an updated interface and (hopefully) better quality control.  Any thought towards contributing towards that, or do you want to stay out of the jQuery project? 

Either way, I really like it, I hope it does well.

Mike B.

--
www.Local-PC-Guy.com - on Twitter @localpcguy
www.mikebehnke.com - on Twitter @behnkem

[Steve Schwartz]

That's an interesting question.

The plugins.jquery site has been horribly broken for a very long time (years!), and the jquery team has always been extremely slow to fix anything related to the site. It's been overrun with spam since I can remember, and one time a year ago, their way of dealing with spam was to shut out *all* users for over a month, without warning. I wish I were kidding or exaggerating. (see http://forum.jquery.com/topic/plugin-repository-status)

I had one plugin at the time hosted on the site, and I could not release a new version, because they literally locked out all users from logging into the site. People kept downloading the old version from the site and encountering bugs, because I couldn't login to update the release.

It's taken them this long to do something about it, and their solution was to completely shut the site down with no notice. I have two plugins now hosted on the site, and got not warning that they were shutting it down. Guess what happens to all the links pointing to the project page? Broken!

I have never been impressed with the jquery team's ability to administer a site, and personally I don't think they should be wasting their time. They should be focusing on the next release of jquery, not some plugin site.

All that being said, if the jquery team were interested in adopting this site (or maybe some sub-domain of it focused entirely on jquery plugins), the way the ruby team adopted gemcutter as the official rubygems site, I'd totally be open to that. But I think that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves.

Thanks, Mike!

-- Steve Schwartz

[Kevin Dangoor]

Well this discussion turns out to be timed interestingly...

they accidentally just deleted everything on the jQuery plugins site:

http://blog.jquery.com/2011/12/08/what-is-happening-to-the-jquery-plugins-site/

and they're going to replace it right away with a new site that can work off of post commit hooks on GitHub.

Kevin

--
Kevin Dangoor

work: http://mozilla.com/
email: k...@blazingthings.com
blog: http://www.BlueSkyOnMars.com

[Steve Schwartz]

I know, the really weird thing is how eerily similar their proposed site is to JSPkg!

-- Steve Schwartz

[Brandon Dimcheff]

Point 4 seems to make you the winner. ;)

--
--
Brandon Dimcheff

[Mike Behnke]

I was just going back to dig up this email chain after reading that.  I like that the packages on the plugins.jquery will still reside on Github, just makes things easier when it comes to downloading (if you already use Git/Github.) 

As for JSPkg - I would promote the crap out of it being library agnostic.  Rather than focus on jQuery and that it also allows JavaScript, focus on how people could upload MooTools plugins, etc. as well - there are quite a few people still using other libraries who might like a place to put/find plugins for those libraries as well. 

I promise, I didn't go say anything to the jQuery folks - maybe it just goes to show that good ideas will (eventually) win out. 

Mike B

[Winston Tsang]

Bullets points may be similar.

Implementation could be a differentiator.

[Chase Lee]

Nice work!  I really like it!  I think the key differentiator here is that this is for all of Javascript, not just jQuery.  Given the direction and momentum of Javascript, agnostic platforms are going to be key to the community IMHO.  Again, nice job, I like it.

[Steve Schwartz]

Hey, thanks for all the feedback guys! If anyone is interested, I added a couple things this week after posting here:

* package.json generator, to help create a package.json file for projects that don't have one yet: http://jspkg.com/generator

* package.json no longer required to upload a project (and you'll be given a chance to download the generated one after you enter the required info)

* import from git! not just Github, but any publicly-accessible git repo

It sounds like everyone is liking the fact that it's for all javascript projects; is this clear enough from the site itself? Is there any way I could play this up or make it more apparent (without cluttering up the homepage)?

Dennis, no I don't know Karl. Hearing that about the drama with the plugins site doesn't surprise me at all, based on my limited interaction with the jquery team. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make the node talk as I have a meeting in Novi at 7, but I will certainly try.

-- Steve Schwartz

[Steve Schwartz]

I'd like to thank everyone again for all your feedback and support through this thread and last night at the node.js talk. I posted it up on hacker news, so any and all comments and votes are greatly appreciated!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3357644

Tell your friends :-)

-- Steve Schwartz