> > In fact I think it is every bit as interesting as ever, it just never > reached enough people who were _already developers_.
This highlights another example of having the priorities backwards in order to have a long-lasting open source product. MooTools focused on making a solid product for front-end developers. At the time, in 2006, this was a rare thing indeed. There were (and are) legions of people making things on the web though. Designers and tinkerers and, just as importantly, developers who DO know how to code but just don't care about JavaScript - the UI is just the thing in front of their server-side code and they don't want to muck around with it - they just want a calendar picker on their form, not a new language to learn. jQuery's potential audience was massive, while MooTools, by it's very definition, was very small. When I say that MooTools' code isn't very interesting, I mean that it solved the problems it came to solve (quite elegantly - I love MooTools! I still use it!), but that it's no longer innovative. Other JavaScript solutions exist that use a lot of the same basic methods. Maybe it's not as clean, but that's fine. But to put it another way, if MooTools were to relaunch it self - or just launch today as if it had never been - would it stand out? What market would it serve that isn't already served? What audience could it attract in today's market place? FWIW, http://jqueryvsmootools.com/ is still pretty accurate despite being 4 years old! It still gets 5K hits a month! -a On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Aaron Newton <anut...@gmail.com> wrote: > Utan, I'll put it to you another way (something I've said here and > elsewhere before). Apache has created a model for developing open source > software that lasts and works. Ask the people working on those projects and > they'll tell you that the projects, especially the popular ones, are both > chaotic and have a lot of bureaucracy. But they last. Here's the order of > their priorities: > > 1. Empower the community, both the developers and the users (see > http://communityovercode.com/). > 2. Make it predictable; roadmaps and clear upgrade paths are mandatory > 3. Make it easy to learn and use > 4. Make the code good > > MooTools, for better AND for worse, had these exact priorities reversed. > The core team focused primarily on making really, really good code. It's > why the codebase is so amazingly consistent and beautiful. They spent some > effort making it easy to learn (so long as you actually knew how to program > JavaScript; not a requirement for jQuery), but spent way less time > communicating with the team and the community about what was coming next > and what the priorities were. Finally, very little time was spent talking > to the community. Blog posts are rare, but it was almost never the case > that core developers were hanging out here. That's ok to a certain degree, > but it meant that *recruiting *was not a priority. Adoption of the > technology was not the goal of the dev team; beautiful code was (and it > shows). > > So Dojo got in with IBM and jQuery started having conferences and YUI is, > well, Yahoo, and so on. jQuery in particular is *exceptional* at both > outreach and recruiting - so much so that its main creator no longer > contributes to it (https://github.com/jquery/jquery/contributors). This > was always something the MooTools team struggled with as its main > contributors spent all their time coding. > > With MooTools, if the main contributor doesn't contribute to it, it > doesn't move forward. This isn't his fault or anyone's fault. It's just an > example of how the goals are different. jQuery always cared about having > lots of people use jQuery. It shows in everything they do (and kudos to > them; they made JavaScript popular and made the web a better place). > > So fast forward a few years and what do you have? You have a lot of people > working on jQuery and the core MooTools team has moved on. Had kids, gotten > jobs that are demanding, and this open source thing is just not their main > priority anymore. And so it languishes. > > If the MooTools community really wanted the framework to move forward they > could do it. Just go fork the thing and start writing code. It's all there > on github and there's lots of stuff you can do to make it better and more > interesting. Don't wait around for someone who made something interesting 6 > years ago to do it for you. They're off doing their own interesting things > and you should be happy for them. It's your turn to pay it forward. > > -a > > > On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 9:06 PM, utan <vcomputado...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> @Nutron, >> >> So because jQuery's main devs passed the project to a new blood it still >> alive and thriving? and because its modular and its well thought and easy >> to learn..? >> >> what am I missing? what happens is that some big companies back them up >> and they were good moving their assets why Mootools devs lacked on those >> fields.. >> >> They keep maintaining it because it gives them money that's all is not >> because is an old monolithic framework hell it's so damn good.. >> Compared to jQuery all the good things die because their creators are so >> greedy to let others command and then what? people that loved and learned >> from it >> end up messed up because they didn't learn raw javacript but learned >> from a framework and they need to learn from a mediocre framework like >> jQuery.. >> the hell with this.. >> >> -- >> >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MooTools Users" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to mootools-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. >> >> >> > > -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MooTools Users" group. 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