I discovered the Open Source project directory Ohloh yesterday (thanks to Andres Almiray’s post that I noticed on JavaBlogs). Oddly the name Ohloh is instantly forgettable and I’m having to look up the URL each time I go there.
By querying CVS and Subversion repositories, Ohloh generates information about the state of a project and ties individual contributions to developer profiles. It also allows individuals to list which Open Source projects they are users of. The site uses Google Maps to show how both contributors and users are distributed geographically.
I added my Watchmaker evolutionary computation project (the Ohloh entry is here). Unfortunately java.net‘s strategy of hosting web content in the Subversion repository does skew the statistics somewhat (my contributions appear to be mostly HTML content, but this is mainly generated Javadoc output).
Of the information presented, most pleasing for me is the nice green tick the project gets for being well commented:
Across all Java projects on Ohloh, 35% of all source code lines are comments. For Watchmaker Evolution Framework, this figure is 45%.
This high number of comments puts Watchmaker Evolution Framework among the highest one-third of all Java projects on Ohloh.
A high number of comments might indicate that the code is well-documented and organized, and could be a sign of a helpful and disciplined development team.
That’s a good reference for my CV: “Dan is a helpful and disciplined development team.” 🙂