Back in the day (certainly a long time ago) when I was a designer, arguments about what “inspiration” versus “copying” were abounded. I’m sure they still do to this day, though they are typically called “rips” as opposed to copies, which is why I wasn’t surprised when a PHP friend of mine, Harry Fuecks, stated equivocally (as Harry often does) that .NET and Java were now paying “homage” (ripping, copying, whatever… at least he was civil about it ;)) to PHP with the recent release of “Nuke” toolkits for both.

Both JBoss (read more about it here, and all credit to Harry for the links) and .NET both released similar toolkits, at least in name, to the various PHP Nuke projects (phpnuke, postnuke, etc).

But, to what degree is this copying? Is it just marketing hype? Did they truly borrow ideas from “Nuke”? Is it all just common sense?

Evaluating the Offerings

First off, both the Java Nuke and DotNetNuke projects are designed entirely from the ground up. The Java Nuke project was created by the JBoss crew after they tried out postNuke and found it to be lacking in terms of the massive load effect it had on their server, and their inability (even after working with the community and trying everything) to lessen that impact.

DotNetNuke is actually the rebranding of the old IBuySpy Workshop, which was a decent CMS project used in teaching folk new to .NET, or at least new to the concept of websites as fully fledged applications, some of the basics and keys to application design.

Were They Copied?

Neither application copied much of anything, though the JBoss people certainly tip their hats, in a rather friendly manner (read the article linked to above). The JBoss one used what they’d learned in years of solid application theory and development to create was is essentially a Nuke-like CMS.

But, what is a Nuke-like CMS (NLCMS? ;))? Perhaps we should look at DotNetNuke to find out. The IBS Workshop was released over two years ago. While the improvements to the Workshop in it’s new form as DotNetNuke are significant, and will only continue to increase as time goes on, the only similarity between DNN and the PHP Nuke projects is the modular aspect and the name.

Marketing?

While I can’t speak for the developers of either piece of software, it seems to me that they merely created a “type” of CMS which was already widely spread (after all Movable Type, which powers this blog, uses something very similar) and decided to borrow the name “Nuke” to communicate that selfsame message.

I can never be sure, and if Harry were reading this he’d likely never let it slide, but I, for one, hope that the various projects can actually learn from each other as that will only be better for all of us.