Open Sourcing

I admittedly look at the Open Source movement as one that parallels a spirtual or NGO cause. At the core of it, there isn't allure of money that drives people to work hard and then to share their ideas openly. Something about that tells me that the movement as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and this is shown every day with more and more code that is available for use. I owe an incalculable amount of my development and knowledge to this movement, and I didn't have pay a penny if I so choose not to. I've probably learned more through Open Source on development than my time in college.

It is time for me to become one of the parts of this movement. I want to attempt to give back freely what I have taken away in hopes to help out others; at the very least to support the movement. I must admit that I am quite nervous though, I am exposing my ideas and code which I usually am very protective of. They will be open to ridicule for those that choose to use my code.

I've been working on two different frameworks with a buddy at work that includes quite an extensive amount of different modules. To give an idea, we probably have roughly around 8-10k lines of code. First, a php, super lightweight framework. Yes, I realize that the world might not need yet another php framework, but after using MVC frameworks such as Cake and Zend I was blown away at the size of the framework that was needed to get up and running on a new project. The challenge was to keep this framework as light as possible while sill providing all of the necessary functionality. I think that we did a pretty good job. The time that it took to develop probably equaled the time that we talked it over and this is usually a good thing. Hopefully that'll be an indication of the quality.

Next, a series of plug-ins that are piggy-backing off of jQuery. This is probably what I'm most proud of. I believe the code quality to be fairly strong. We are using some fairly new, a bit advanced, js code development to keep the code super clean, flexible, and any other buzz word that you choose to insert. It has always been a challenge to develop javascript with the same mindset of true OOP, not just one or two objects that might have a private function/variable that is thrown in there for the novelty of it.

Some of the next major steps will be documentation. If I hope others to use, I need to provide information. At any rate, I hope to release both of these frameworks by the end of the week for those that don't need documentation.

Here is to exposing my brain. Cheers.