About a week ago I started using
StackOverflow and I *instantly* fell in love! StackOverflow is like a
drug. Once you start using it you end up spending all your time there, browsing other people's answers and asking your own questions etc. Here is
my profile at StackOverflow.com in case you're interested seeing what I'm doing over there...
After having used StackOverflow.com for a couple of days I figured that *this* is the way I want to communicate also at
Ra-Ajax.org with our users when they have questions etc. The logic of StackOverflow.com is a new way of communicating and it's a *brilliant* way of communicating. That's the true innovation that
Jeff Atwood and
Joel Spolsky did. They basically invented a new way of communicating as an alternative to forums, FAQs and such...
Almost a decade ago
WikiPedia and more specifically
MediaWiki as its implementation changed the way we create, browse and find information. Until StackOverflow.com was released forums was our only means of asking questions and helping each other. MediaWiki didn't solve this problem. I think Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky did for "forums" what MediaWiki did for "information" and "encyclopedias". They totally flipped the tables and invented a new and far superior way of communicating when you have a *question* and need help with a specific problem - StackOverflow.com. However I think the implementation behind StackOverflow.com is just too brilliant to not share it with the rest of the world too...
So here's
Stacked - an Open Source implementation of StackOverlfow.com. I'm gonna let people play with (and go berserk with) the database there for some days to test it out before I (probably) delete the database and make this installation our primary forums for using Ra-Ajax. So play around with it! You don't need to verify your email (yet) and you can just do whatever you wish with it without fearing destroying anything of importance.
Stacked is Open Source and the code can be found at
the Stacked Google Code project.
Here's a video demonstrating some of the basic features of Stacked;
Code behind Stacked
Stacked uses two 3rd Party libraries. Obviously it uses
Ra-Ajax for Ajax. In addition Stacked uses
ActiveRecord as its O/RM library. Both ActiveRecord and Ra-Ajax are brilliant tools. Ra-Ajax (disclaimer - I work with Ra-Ajax) is an Ajax Library for ASP.NET which makes it possible to create really advanced Ajax functionality without even touching JavaScript.
There is not *one* line of JavaScript code written to create Stacked!ActiveRecord is the by far best O/RM library in existance for ASP.NET. It makes creating database abstractions a breeze! I don't even *know* how my database looks like, and I can change from MySQL (which Stacked currently is running on) to MSSQL and Oracle by changing two lines of code in web.config.
I have so far spent
less then 3 days on creating Stacked. I started last Tuesday at about 21:00, and today is Friday the same week. There is also less then 1000 lines of code in Stacked so far. And sure Stacked is no where near "finished", but the speed at which Stacked emerged was only possible because of using the two brilliant tools;
Ra-Ajax and
ActiveRecord. I encourage everyone that needs Ajax or O/RM to check out
Ra-Ajax and
ActiveRecord...
Go and
play with Stacked or
check out the code. So far Stacked is licensed as GPL, but I am open for suggestions here. I want Stacked to become a community driven project so if you have some brilliant piece of coding you'd like to do, let me know by sending me an
email and if you prove yourself worthy I'll give you write access to the SVN...
Have fun, we do ;)
Thomas