As an HtmlUnit committer, every month or so I spend about half an hour searching the web for new mentions of the project, just to get an idea of the latest buzz, unreported problems, unsung praises, etc. During the latest of these searches, I ended up at ohloh, an online directory for open source software projects.
The site lists a large number of projects, and includes interesting metrics for each of them, including codebase size, estimated effort and cost necessary to reproduce the codebase, level of documentation, related projects, user ratings and reviews, etc. Here are some of the metrics, as of today, for HtmlUnit and some related projects:
| Project | Lines of Code | Man Years of Effort | Total Cost ($) |
| HtmlUnit | 53,137 | 13 | 698,513 |
| HttpUnit | 30,967 | 7 | 399,128 |
| jWebUnit | 9,385 | 2 | 111,795 |
| Canoo WebTest | 77,505 | 19 | 1,024,914 |
Both jWebUnit and Canoo WebTest are based on HtmlUnit, using it internally to do the HTML / JavaScript heavy lifting. However, jWebUnit appears to be a thin wrapper, while Canoo WebTest is larger than HtmlUnit itself! HttpUnit is somewhat smaller than HtmlUnit, which makes sense: HtmlUnit provides a higher level of abstraction and supports many more JavaScript constructs than HttpUnit does.
It’ll be interesting to see if this site takes off or not. Developers often have to pull information from a wide array of sources in order to make informed decisions as to the libraries that they need to include in their stack. While ohloh provides some of this information, there is one glaring omission: community size and growth trends. This is usually measured via mailing list activity — lots of posts to the mailing lists imply a large user community. It would be nice to have this information listed as well, and not just as a factoid in the summary section.
Regardless of this small omission, ohloh is a fun site to browse. It’s interesting to see their take on the various software projects out there, and it’s entertaining to compare competing libraries (SVN vs CVS!). If lots of people actually start using it to recommend and critique software, it might become an extremely useful website.
Jason Allen said,
May 7, 2007 at 1:18 am
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for writing on Ohloh. You captured the exact motivation behind what made me decide to write Ohloh – the incredible amount of choice available in the open source world.
Mailing list activity has been on our minds for a while. I agree with you – it’s definitely a hole in our offering.
However – I wanted to let you know about the major release we just released. We’ve enhanced the “Stack It” functionality so as to make it really easy (and worthwhile) to describe your software stack. We offer suggestions based on what similar people have stacked (and more…). The relative count of stacks that contain a project can give us an idea of the adoption/community size for projects.
We’ll continue evaluating integrating into mailing lists. Meanwhile – thanks for the kind words and let me know if you have any more requests!
Daniel Gredler said,
May 9, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Hi Jason, it’s good to hear that you guys are thinking about ways to improve the site. Thanks for a great resource!