1 post from December 2007

Thievery! Oh nonsense.

I happened across an interesting little project today. A project to create a Javascript GUI framework by one Greg Houston who, by an amazing coincidence has decided to design it in a way that's similar to my own framework. And by another stunning coincidence he has chosen to name it... Mocha. How peculiar. How peculiar indeed. Is this a case of blatant theft of an idea? I'm flattered if it is, for two reasons: 1) It validates the idea, and 2) It means people know who I am. Shocked, tho I am, I'm also not angry. I'd like to be. It's been my concern that my stupid dilly-dallying on this project would find me outpaced by the less visionary but more diligent and organized and until now I had every reason to believe that that concern was merely my imagination, but it seems I was right, at least to some extent. Well again I'm vindicate in my views, tho this vindication is perhaps less desirable. However, it doesn't matter. The framework I'm (not-so-often-ly) working on was always going to be open source anyway, given the obvious inability to hide JS code from prying eyes. However I'm saddened no one thought to even mention this alternate project to me. Perhaps Greg doesn't even know who I am, and merely came up with this in parallel, but the similarities are too great. Perhaps we share a mutual friend and without realizing was informed of the idea I had and set out on his own to create what he thought was a good idea, not realizing the idea was actually a memory of something. Either way, it is what it is. To that end I feel I might as well open up what little I have so far to the world. I warn you: it's not pretty -- I don't pretend to be a great programmer, or even a good programmer -- it's horrendously slow (I'm working on a new way to implement class-based inheritance in JS so that it runs faster than what I've currently got, which will obviously be rendered pointless in JS2 but such is life, ey?), and it's far from being done, but it is everything I have worked on so far. So here it is, the original Moka, not yet complete but in its current entirety:



I should probably set up some sort of website for it at the domain I have for the project, but I'm no good with that sort of thing. It's necessary now, tho, I suppose. At the very least to keep me working on it and to build a community for it. Eh. Quick note: I'm not releasing this, as such. This is still copyright me, that's obvious. However I don't care if you mess with it right now. Just understand, it's not ready to be used in anything serious, nor is it ready for official release. The official versions (if they should ever exist) will be better and will be licensed probably under the LGPL.

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