Sort by Star Count

[dontirun]

Description

Add 'Least stars' and 'Most stars' as sort metrics on the website, and possibly default to 'Most stars'

Use Case

I would like to be able to sort community constructs by star count as I think it's a helpful metric for popularity.

Other information

npm downloads alone can be manipulated or misrepresented. As mentioned in a npm blogpost the download count includes.

• automated build servers
• downloads by mirrors
• robots that download every package for analysis

Download count can still be useful for identifying trends, but there should be options for other metrics, especially if ConstructHub is continually indexing packages

[Chriscbr]

I think a feature like this could be tricky to add because not all projects published to npm are on GitHub. In addition, information about a package's repository URL provided by package.json could be incorrect or even misrepresented (as there is no mechanism that validates this is correct).

[dontirun]

That's a very good point. Is there potential for some sort of rating system within ConstructHub (appstore like rating features)? Community driven input would be helpful for searching through constructs, especially when there are many similar options.

[MrArnoldPalmer]

@dontirun we have talked about creating some sort of aggregate to indicate "popularity" or how active a project is in general. Something like a combination of github stars, # of recently closed issues, npm downloads, frequency of recent commits, etc.

If you're interested in this definitely feel free to do some research and let us know what you think would be the best strategy. My instinct is that we could compute this for each package while computing other metadata, like tags, and put it into the metadata where it will be added to the catalog to use for searching/sorting. So around here in the current code.

[dontirun]

Another idea would be to add construct specific information into the cdk analytics metadata. However that could have some privacy concerns and there could be issues with max template size given the usage of many constructs.

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