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by slg 4660 days ago
Somewhat off topic, but I wish there was a credible site out there that reviewed these type of general libraries. There are hundreds of them out there and when I need to find one it usually comes with hours of research trying to decide on the right one to use. It would be great if there was a place to look up the general strengths and weaknesses of each without doing all the necessary leg work.
5 comments

You make a good point, I'm not familiar with many of these libraries. Can you please provide some links.

I'm familiar with:

- Stripe jQuery.payment.js (formance is based on this project, extended beyond payment forms) https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment

- Masked Input (good for basic formatting, and does not include validating) https://github.com/digitalBush/jquery.maskedinput

- Validate.js (does not include formatting) http://rickharrison.github.io/validate.js/

I was just speaking in general terms. I am not familiar enough with this particular niche to know all the competing libraries, which is basically my original point. I wouldn't use a library like this in any major product of mine until I did the necessary research and decided it was truly the best option. I imagine numerous other developers have the same process before relying on a library for their own projects. That is a lot of redundant work researching and evaluating these things.
I think he meant JS libraries in general. Not just formatting libraries.
There is http://www.jsdb.io/ and there is another one which I'm searching in my bookmarks, will update.

EDIT: found it - http://jster.net/

There is the jQuery Plugin Registry (http://plugins.jquery.com/). There aren't many people using it tho.

There is also a really simple guideline to publish your plugin there: http://plugins.jquery.com/docs/publish/

Currently, there is no way to review which plugin is better. But at least it shows the number of watchers for each plugin, which can be an okay indicator whether a plugin is good or bad.

That is useful, but obviously only applies to jQuery plugins.
yeah but for each category there is already hundreds of libraries with new ones popping up every week, it would be a massive time consuming effort to just analyze one category and keep up with any recent developments in it, times that by say 20 categories and your looking at 100's of hours of effort
Agreed...and you're not the first person to mention this need.

A good curation/ranking site for all of the various JS libs would be helpful.

Its wasteful for every developer to read the code of numerous JS libs just to figure out which one(s) was(were) written well.