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I've been doing js development for years and feel the same pain when I need to look for the npm package with the right balance of functionalities,size,active de

I've been doing js development for years and feel the same pain when I need to look for the npm package with the right balance of functionalities,size,active development,popularity etc. A dedicated site for package recommendation would definitely save lots of time, currently, I use npmtrends.com for this. I quickly checked for packages on openbase.io for rendering table and found out there were packages only for vuejs. why to exclude react packages? I also understand it's an mvp but Package results sorting should be there. Reviews would definitely help but I'd also prefer to see likes/upvotes on those reviews to get extra validation. On a side note how are you ensuring that all popular packages should be included in your database? Otherwise it wouldn't make sense if user needs to crosscheck on google/npm/github like in this case of rendering table. I'll be regularly using openbase for package discovery. Wish you all the best!

liorgrossman 6y ago
Thank you, we all share the same pain with package search. The categories curation in Openbase includes a category, but also a framework. So as you mentioned, under Table libraries, you could have React, Vue, Svelte libraries etc. We currently filter those by framework, but unfortunately, we didn't have the time to fully implement this page prior to the launch. What should be in this page is a dropdown where you can choose from 10 different frameworks, and see the results for that specific framework. That dropdown, along with the URL routing to support it, is still missing from the product. It's one of the most important things on our roadmap, so expect to see it on Openbase soon. Unfortunately, there's no way to 100% ensure all packages are included inside a category since the curation is manual, but I would say we do base it on extensive Google/npm/GitHub search. In the future, we want to involve the community in the curation process, so anyone can suggest new packages for a category or categories to a package. Not a simple thing to implement, but we chose this challenge since we do feel that categorization can provide a lot of value.
- darwinwhy 6y ago
  Ruby toolbox has a wonderfully simple way of crowdsourcing it -- categorizing a package is as simple as submitting a small yaml PR, e.g. https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pull/417/files https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pull/417/files
  - liorgrossman 6y ago
    I didn't know that (and BTW Ruby-Toolbox is a great source of inspiration) I think the challenge with that is that there's no standardization of categories. Both GitHub and npm have the concept of "topics/keywords" that developers can choose. Problem is that every maintainer chooses slightly different keywords, so it becomes ineffective as a tool for discovery. We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like.
    - type0 6y ago
      > We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like. Recommender system based on the kind of keywords in the description, starred project from main contributors etc
      - liorgrossman 6y ago
        I think it would be a good start, but would still require some human vetting. We played with some simple NLP solutions (trying to run TF-IDF on the keywords/description/readme of packages to determine the category), the results weren't great honestly, so we opted of curating everything manually for now.

liorgrossman 6y ago

Thank you, we all share the same pain with package search. The categories curation in Openbase includes a category, but also a framework. So as you mentioned, under Table libraries, you could have React, Vue, Svelte libraries etc. We currently filter those by framework, but unfortunately, we didn't have the time to fully implement this page prior to the launch. What should be in this page is a dropdown where you can choose from 10 different frameworks, and see the results for that specific framework. That dropdown, along with the URL routing to support it, is still missing from the product. It's one of the most important things on our roadmap, so expect to see it on Openbase soon. Unfortunately, there's no way to 100% ensure all packages are included inside a category since the curation is manual, but I would say we do base it on extensive Google/npm/GitHub search. In the future, we want to involve the community in the curation process, so anyone can suggest new packages for a category or categories to a package. Not a simple thing to implement, but we chose this challenge since we do feel that categorization can provide a lot of value.

darwinwhy 6y ago
Ruby toolbox has a wonderfully simple way of crowdsourcing it -- categorizing a package is as simple as submitting a small yaml PR, e.g. https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pull/417/files https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pull/417/files
- liorgrossman 6y ago
  I didn't know that (and BTW Ruby-Toolbox is a great source of inspiration) I think the challenge with that is that there's no standardization of categories. Both GitHub and npm have the concept of "topics/keywords" that developers can choose. Problem is that every maintainer chooses slightly different keywords, so it becomes ineffective as a tool for discovery. We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like.
  - type0 6y ago
    > We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like. Recommender system based on the kind of keywords in the description, starred project from main contributors etc
    - liorgrossman 6y ago
      I think it would be a good start, but would still require some human vetting. We played with some simple NLP solutions (trying to run TF-IDF on the keywords/description/readme of packages to determine the category), the results weren't great honestly, so we opted of curating everything manually for now.