Themistoklis Diamantopoulos
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
npm Packages as Ingredients: A Recipe-based Approach
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Software Technologies
https://doi.org/10.5220/0007966805440551
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Abstract
The sharing and growth of open source software packages in the npm JavaScript (JS) ecosystem has been exponential, not only in numbers but also in terms of interconnectivity, to the extend that often the size of dependencies has become more than the size of the written code. This reuse-oriented paradigm, often attributed to the lack of a standard library in node and/or in the micropackaging culture of the ecosystem, yields interesting insights on the way developers build their packages. In this work we view the dependency network of the npm ecosystem from a "culinary" perspective. We assume that dependencies are the ingredients in a recipe, which corresponds to the produced software package. We employ network analysis and information retrieval techniques in order to capture the dependencies that tend to co-occur in the development of npm packages and identify the communities that have been evolved as the main drivers for npm's exponential growth.
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