Package Reviewer
Authors: Ronak Shah
Abstract: Package Reviewer is a community driven site where one can post and read reviews for various R packages. This is meant to be a useful tool which will make it possible to decide which packages are reliable and trustworthy.
Full Description: At work I was once told to implement a new feature on the project that I was working on. I thought this feature suits very well with the X framework that I had heard of but never got the chance to work. I started looking up if there is an R implementation of X framework. Luckily, there wasn't one but two implementations of it. I started comparing them both to decide which one should I choose.
I started looking at their GitHub repositories. Which one has more number of stars? Which one was recently updated? How many issues they have in their repository? Is the author responsive to the issues created? That is to understand if we found a bug or need some feature request in the future would the author be responsive for it. All this were manual and subjective ways to gauge if the package is closer to what we are looking for. If I needed a package for data manipulation I know there are packages like dplyr , data.table, collapse etc. These packages are very well known, well documented and tested thoroughly so we can blindly trust them. The issues arises for packages that aren't well known and are very specific.
I started wondering what if there was a platform which allows users to enter their review of the packages. How they feel about it and how they would rate the package. It would make the entire package deciding experience much easier.
When you can't find it, build it.
Since there was nothing like this already available, I started to think of building such a site where users can come in and see the reviews of the packages that they are interested in for which you don't need to create any account. However, if you want to post a review you need to sign up with your email address. I wanted to make barrier to entry as minimal as possible. Posting reviews without an account would not make sense so had to authorize the user before they post any review. Also email address is verified for security reasons. We don't want to be in a situation where users add random email addresses to the portal.
It currently has only R packages, but I don't see any issue expanding this to other languages like Python, Javascript and so on but this will happen only when the R version is at least moderately successful.
The app is deployed at Package Reviewer . If you have any feedback or want to report an issue you can do so by adding it to GitHub Sign in to GitHub · GitHub .
Shiny app: Package Reviewer
Repo: GitHub - shahronak47/packagerevieweR
Thumbnail:
Full image:
