VersionEye: Badge for the number of references

[reiz]

It would be nice to have a badge for the number of references. VersionEye is showing how many references a project has. Log4r for example is used by 208 other Gems. Here is the list of log4r references:

https://www.versioneye.com/ruby/log4r/references

This is the badge.

http://img.shields.io/badge/references-208-green.svg

It would be nice to have it this way:

http://img.shields.io/versioneye/ruby/log4r/references.svg

[espadrine]

This looks interesting. However, I am struggling to figure out how we can get to those references. This page seems to indicate that they do not currently provide a hook to fetch this information. While we could grep the HTML data, we have thus far refrained from using such brittle techniques. My advice is to ask them to provide support for that, preferably by using the standard Shields images.

On the other hand, there seems to be an easy way to support VersionEye's dependency system, much like we currently support Gemnasium. Would you be interested by that?

[reiz]

Hi @espadrine. I can build another API Endpoint for VersionEye which returns the number of references for a given project. That's not a problem.

And I'm definitely interested in supporting VersionEye's dependency system. What I have to do for that?

[espadrine]

Ah, you're actually making VersionEye!

From a vendor perspective, the easiest and safest way to use Shields is to redirect the badges we provide. For instance, upon receiving this request, your server could do the following:

Client request:
https://www.versioneye.com/ruby/log4r/1.1.11/badge.svg
→ Server request:
  https://img.shields.io/badge/dependencies-none-brightgreen.svg
  → Shields.io
  ← image data
← image data

The main pros of this technique:

• We don't see data sent from private accounts,
• The badges will maintain the same look and feel as all badges from other vendors.

Another possibility is to have a public URL-based interface through which we can get to the number of references for a project; say, as a new key in /api/v2/products/{lang}/{prod_key}. We can already get to the dependency information from the headers at /{lang}/{prod_key}/badge.png.

[hkdobrev]

http://blog.versioneye.com/2014/05/06/new-api-endpoint-for-references/

Any progress on those references badges?

Thank you for being awesome!

[reiz]

@hkdobrev Not yet. I will continue on this project this week :-)

[reiz]

@hkdobrev Currently we are facing some performance issues because of that feature. That's why I had to turn it off for now. I wrote a blog post about that here http://blog.versioneye.com/2014/07/16/mongodb-aggregation-slows-down-server/ Input is welcome.

[espadrine]

Wow. Good luck on making this feature fast! ☺

[reiz]

@espadrine @hkdobrev I figured out why it's so slow :-)
http://blog.versioneye.com/2014/07/21/mongodb-lessons-learned/
And now it's fast again. So the next step is the reference badge :-)

[hkdobrev]

@reiz 👏 🍻

[espadrine]

Awesome!

[reiz]

@hkdobrev @espadrine Here we go: http://blog.versioneye.com/2014/07/23/reference-badges/

Some examples:
https://www.versioneye.com/ruby/rails/reference_badge.svg?style=flat
https://www.versioneye.com/ruby/mongoid/reference_badge.svg?style=flat

[espadrine]

Great! Love it!

[hkdobrev]

Great! Thank you @reiz! I think these badges will be extremely popular 😄

[reiz]

@hkdobrev Not sure about that. I send out a couple pull requests and some declined them :-( But most accepted them :-)

[paulmelnikow]

VersionEye has sunset, so closing.

https://blog.versioneye.com/2017/10/19/versioneye-sunset-process/

Ref: #1947