Project history

A brief (!?!) history of a website generate tool ... as handed down from generation to generation :-)

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

Along came Joe, and decided to fork in an attempt to rebrand and ditch the legacy. And so jMock war born. 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 analysing 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 (found here). This was a few years ago. And the result is the jMock website.

Along came Joe (again!) and really liked the look and navigation of the jMock website and wanted a similar thing for his new project XStream. 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 (historians will be able to uncover the original code here). And the result was the current XStream website. --- uhmm ... starting to look 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 the result is the JBehave website

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 the result is the ProxyToys website

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 the result is the XSite website

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 the result is the BuildMaster website