I'm looking for some Rails/Facebook functionality that has already been built - as a starting point for my own Facebook-consuming Rails app. The problem is, when I search on Github I find gazoogles of apps that fall into this category and no easy way to distinguish one from the other. Is there a secret to this? Or do you only use Github after you have read about a project outside of Github (where?)?
+4
A:
In life, how do you distinguish the good from the bad?
Generally, you're going to have to make some sort of judgement call. You can browse the code to check the quality. Hearing about something outside of GitHub is good, too, as well as seeing other people use it in their projects on GitHub. Also, see how many forks it has, how active they are, and how well the maintainer accepts patches.
These are general rules I use for determining whether any free software is worth using.
- Is it used by a lot of other people, especially larger projects, or just a handful
- Does it have active development?
- Does it have more than one or two people working on it, so if one person gets bored it will still be maintained?
Brian Campbell
2009-04-24 00:13:43
Does it take a lot of research to figure all of this out? Do you just start by searching about each project on Goolge? This sounds like a lot of work!
Chris Collins
2009-04-24 00:21:27
It depends on how important the answer is. Take a look at the code that's there. Could you maintain it if the original author stops maintaining it? If it's too big for you to maintain yourself, then you need to make sure it has a good community. It doesn't usually take too long to find out how many other projects are using something; a little Google searching gets you a long way. Looking at the fork queue is also a pretty fast way to see what's going on with a project's development.
Brian Campbell
2009-04-24 02:17:58