This is a short followup to my last post where I compared library RubyForge statistics against CPAN. This week I compare RubyForge against…the Ruby Application Archive!
Yes, I know, the RAA is just a listing service and RubyForge is not. That’s not the point. Please read on.
In the last post I made a rough guess of about 200 libraries on the RAA that are not hosted on RubyForge. I’m going to go into a little more detail about my findings. Because, man, was I off!
First, time in service. RubyForge has been in existence since July 2003. The RAA has been around since December 1999.1
Second, number of projects. As I stated before RubyForge has about 5000 distinct libraries. The RAA has 1610 projects owned by 820 distinct authors.2
Obviously there’s a lot of overlap between the RAA and RubyForge, in that many of the libraries on RubyForge are already listed on the RAA. But many are not, and vice-versa. That’s the point of this article. :)
Finally, the overlap. Of the 1610 projects on the RAA, 1182 are NOT on RubyForge!3 It also means that, of the 5000 or so projects on RubyForge, a scant 428 are also listed on the RAA.4
What does that mean? If nothing else, it means you should search both the RAA and RubyForge when you’re looking for a library. There’s some good stuff you won’t want to miss like algebraic libraries, a bunch of blogging libraries, cgi libs, cvs libs, doc manipulators, event libraries, libraries for creating executables, language extenders, feed handlers, html parsers & generators, wrappers for 3rd party C libraries, linguistics stuff, memory mapping, network interfaces, regex engines, graphics libraries, randomizers, and unicode libraries, oh my!
It also probably means we should try to get tighter integration between RubyForge and the RAA. Perhaps some mechanism where we can autolink RubyForge projects to the RAA.
Thoughts?
1 The oldest listed library is ‘rubymgl’ by Akifumi GuionShouja Nakamura, for those interested.
2 Mostly distinct. There are probably slightly less than 820 authors because a few sometimes use their full name and sometimes they use a nickname. Let’s call it 805 to give us a nice, round 2:1 ratio. :)
3 A few are dead. I didn’t test all the homepage links.
4 The figures aren’t _quite_ that exact because a few people have placeholder projects on RubyForge but host elsewhere. Call it 25%.
Good post. I think the impression in English-speaking circles is that RAA is pretty much dead, but this is far from the case.
Dan, we should donate our WWW::RAA code to someone who'd be willing to hack a PHP version for GForge. I've got an implementation laying around that just uses Net::HTTP, no mechanize.
So while the PHP folks are over here because of Derek's post, please consider helping us by hacking on GForge and giving us a RubyForge2Raa hook for releases.
Good post and tip about searching both the RAA and RubyForge sites.
+1 for auto-linking them together
It would be nice if the gems could be published on RAA too.
the forge should be rewritten in ruby. I see a bunch of practical reasons for this besides the not-irrelevant pride issue. like most sites, it could benefit a lot from some sexier style and better ajax. the navigation is also kind of confusing and the forums are far too lonely. with so much wisdom in this community I'm sure we could build a lot of useful (if not revolutionary) development resources into this site. let's call it an open source rails app - let the speccing begin.
"3 A few are dead. I didn’t test all the homepage links."
I actually think that there is significantly more than "a few" of these dead.
Sadly :(
At least on RAA (this was my perception, which may be flawed)
Yeah, there are some dead links on RAA, and unresponsive authors of apparently abandoned projects, but RubyForge is full of abandoned/orphaned projects. ( I have a few myself )
One major distinction I see is that RAA is not so full of Rails stuff as is RubyForge. In fact, RAA seems to have a lot of interesting little bits from Ruby's days as a hobbyist's language in Japan. Some of the code there posted ages ago from Japan is really well written stuff. You might have trouble reading the comments if you can't read Japanese, but the code is pretty nice.
@schwabsauce,
I vote for replacing it with Redmine:
http://www.redmine.org