Story of Forkers and Their Forks

As Joe describes it:

Also documented on XSite History

Once upon a time, there was a mock objects library called DynaMock
written by Nat, living on mockobjects.com.

Joe came along and decided to fork in an attempt to rebrand and ditch
the legacy. And so jMock was born. Of course, Joe didn’t actually do
much code, he just forked Nat’s code and launched the new
jMock website. Joe didn’t even do that very well and because he was feeling
so lazy he used Maven to create a very bad and unusable website.

Meanwhile, Nat was doing great things with jMock but hated the
website. So he spent some time analyzing user requirements for
building a more useful website and came up with a new design.

Nat built this site upon some little Ruby scripts called skinner.rb
and xemplate.rb (here it is:
http://fisheye.codehaus.org/browse/jmock/jmock/website).
This was a few years ago.

And here is the result: http://jmock.org/

Joe came along and really liked the look and navigation of the XStream
website and wanted a similar thing for his opensource project.
However, for ego stroking reasons ;), thought it could be done pretty
easily as a ‘mashup’ between two of his existing opensource projects.

So Joe reimplemented it in Java using SiteMesh and XStream. He called
it MiniMesh. The code is here:
http://svn.xstream.codehaus.org/browse/xstream/trunk/xstream-website/

And here is the result: http://xstream.codehaus.org/ - hmm… looks familiar.

Not long after, Dan was also looking for a website for his opensource
project, jBehave. He liked Ruby and grabbed Nat’s scripts.

And here is the result. http://jbehave.codehaus.org/

Meanwhile, Nat was making lots of improvements to his scripts, but Joe
and Dan were missing out.

A little later, Dan started another opensource project, ProxyToys.
Jörg stepped up and drove it. Coincidentally, Jörg had also been
driving XStream so he took Joe’s fork of Nat’s website and used that.

And here is the result: http://proxytoys.codehaus.org/

Wait a minute! Jörg and Mauro (who was also driving XStream) noticed a
lot of forking and duplication going on.

So they created XSite, which was a fork of Joe’s Java fork of Nat’s Ruby code.

This was a tool people could use to build similar sites.

And here is the result: http://xsite.codehaus.org/

Meanwhile, Shane, who was involved with jBehave, had a similar idea
and forked Dan’s fork of Nat’s fork and worked into his BuildMaster
project:

And here is the result: http://buildmaster.rubyforge.org/

BuildMaster Part of the Fork, by Shane

Finally fed up with the clumsy File API in Java, and there were really not a whole lot to do
in the evening while traveling to Xi’an, Shane forked their work and started another opensource project. They have heard of jBehave and
was intrigued by the idea so they decided to use this project to try it out.

The implementation of project Cotta with jBehave was a success,
but they hated the IDE support for jBehave, as in, well, none, and
they also did not like the content of the documentation.

So they decided to fork their work again to get involved with jBehave, starting by contributing plugins and updating the
website.

This is when Shane came to know the skinner.rb and xemplate.rb, originally written by Nat and
pretty much still resided in jMock repository.

Having experienced the pain of maintaining two static websites and trying to come up with ways to make sure each site
has a nice and consistent look, even been to the land as far as the dark side of Microsoft Frontpage, Shane realizes that
this is a neat and simple solution.

However, Shane have never enjoyed writing HTML tags or editing the CSS files, and Dan expressed the idea of writing the
content in Textile format.

Since there is already a Ruby implementation of Textile, Shane forked his work, yet again. He consolidated his other Ruby
script for releasing project, and started BuildMaster project on rubyforge.

The original scripts were used as base, and were modified so that the content can be either straight XHTML or Textile.
As the number of content files grew, the server and testing feature were added so that the user can see the result of the change
immediatelly and make sure that there are no broken link on the website.

And BuildMaster 0.6.0 was born.