A look at the dynamics of the JavaScript package ecosystem

Wittern, Erik; Suter, Philippe; Rajagopalan, Shriram

doi:10.1145/2901739.2901743

Cited by 123 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Network-based analysis of programming language dependency networks has emerged recently. A first large-scale analysis of the npm ecosystems was carried out by Wittern et al [8]. Their analysis concludes that JavaScript is a striving ecosystem because of frequent releases of new and existing packages.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are similarities with existing research, but none of them fully covers the scope and problem of this paper. Wittern et al [8] and Decan et al look at the network topologies for npm, PyPI (Python) and CRAN (R). Compared to [8], our work considers the network analysis in more detail and includes applications in the network analysis step.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wittern et al [8] and Decan et al look at the network topologies for npm, PyPI (Python) and CRAN (R). Compared to [8], our work considers the network analysis in more detail and includes applications in the network analysis step. Compared to [9], [10] we also focus on the network evolution and outline more accurate dependency network model.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, not much is known about the static properties and topologies of programming language package ecosystems. For example, we know to what extent dependencies are used in packages only [8], [9]. However, we do not know if there are differences in dependency usages across published packages and applications?…”

Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, dependency management practices have received little attention, despite being a crucial part of almost all software projects. A recent study of the JavaScript package ecosystem [8] revealed that dependency requirement specifications using semantic versioning with flexible version constraints (e.g. the latest version) are widely used.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Kikas

Gousios

Dumas

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

139

129

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Abstract-Software developers often include available opensource software packages into their projects to minimize redundant effort. However, adding a package to a project can also introduce risks, which can propagate through multiple levels of dependencies. Currently, not much is known about the structure of open-source package ecosystems of popular programming languages and the extent to which transitive bug propagation is possible. This paper analyzes the dependency network structure and evolution of the JavaScript, Ruby, and Rust ecosystems. The reported results reveal significant differences across language ecosystems. The results indicate that the number of transitive dependencies for JavaScript has grown 60% over the last year, suggesting that developers should look more carefully into their dependencies to understand what exactly is included. The study also reveals that vulnerability to a removal of the most popular package is increasing, yet most other packages have a decreasing impact on vulnerability. The findings of this study can inform the development of dependency management tools.

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Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Kikas

Gousios

Dumas

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

139

129

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Modeling and exploring the evolution of the mobile software ecosystem: How far are we?

Xiao,

Xu,

Zhang

et al. 2023

J Software Evolu Process

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The health of mobile software ecosystems is closely related to the interests of software developers, end‐users, and stakeholders. Therefore, it is crucial to maintain the mobile software ecosystem healthy and functioning. Researchers have done considerable research on mobile software ecosystems like Android and iOS. However, the evolution laws implicit in mobile software ecosystems have not attracted widespread attention. This paper proposes a research framework for investigating the evolution process and influencing factors of mobile software ecosystems based on community mining. Firstly, we mine the evolving ecosystem from many mobile software projects based on a community detection algorithm. Then we analyze the evolution process of the ecosystem by identifying evolution events in different periods. Furthermore, we utilize the multinomial logistics regression model to analyze the relevant indicators and summarize the crucial factors affecting the evolution. Meanwhile, by training the long short term memory (LSTM) model to predict evolution events, our prediction accuracy can reach 75%. This work can be used to maintain and improve the healthy operations of mobile software ecosystems.

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On the (un‐)adoption of JavaScript front‐end frameworks

2021

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JavaScript is characterized by a rich ecosystem of libraries and frameworks.A key element in this ecosystem are frameworks used for implementing the front-end of web-based applications, such as Vue and React. However, despite their relevance, we have few works investigating the factors that drive the adoption-and un-adoption-of front-end-based JavaScript frameworks. Therefore, in this article, we first report the results of a survey with 49 developers where we asked them to describe the factors they consider when selecting a front-end framework. In the second part of the work, we focus on projects that migrate from one framework to another since JavaScript's ecosystem is also very dynamic. Finally, we provide a quantitative characterization of the migration effort and reveal the main barriers faced by the developers during this effort. Although not completely generalizable, our central findings are as follows: (a) popularity and learnability are the key factors that motivate the choice of front-end frameworks in JavaScript; (b) from the 49 surveyed developers, one out of four have plans to migrate to another framework in the future; (c) the time spent performing the migration is greater than or equal to the time spent using the old framework in all studied projects. We conclude with a list of implications for practitioners, framework developers, tool builders, and researchers.

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A look at the dynamics of the JavaScript package ecosystem

Cited by 123 publications

References 17 publications

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Modeling and exploring the evolution of the mobile software ecosystem: How far are we?

On the (un‐)adoption of JavaScript front‐end frameworks

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