What is the biggest wheel you reinvented?

Question

What is the biggest library/tool/framework/etc you wrote only to discover that it is freely available or already exists somewhere?

Answer 1

I implemented ActiveRecord in PHP 4 back in 2005.

Rails was pretty new, and I didn't even know it existed. I also wasn't aware of an active record implementation in PHP, so I went ahead and implemented it myself.

Answer 2

Well, Al Gore once reinvented the internet... does that count?

Answer 3

Recently I ported my website to Python and after a few months of work, I discovered that I'd basically reimplemented Django... (not the whole thing obviously, not in a few months, but it was heading in that direction)

Answer 4

Pretty much everything i've tried to do in Java there's been a free and (usually) better wheel already made.

Answer 5

Well, I know people, that wrote an interpreted C-like language compiler/interpreter, and later on extended it with most of the C++ features, even templates and so.

Answer 6

I know people who tried to re-invent a "programming questions" web site into a chat forum for trading war stories.

Answer 7

Whilst doing my cs final project I had never heard of an orm so I spent ages (about 3 hours in student land) trying to write a mapping module.

Answer 8

Frameworks. Over the years, I've created several frameworks for text user interfaces, GUIs, web applications.

Answer 9

I once wrote a user-defined function in Oracle to capitalise the first letter of every word in a text string. I even called it F_INITCAP.

Answer 10

A javascript getElementById method that surfed the DOM searching all the id attributes....

Answer 11

I am coding up my own blog ... that has to be the top of the "Most Reinvented Wheel".

Answer 12

I ever wrote a smtp server and found I can got many free implementations of smtp server after three months.

Answer 13

It happened twice with me.

along with the releaseof vs2005 and .net 2.0, we heavily used Datasets and Datareaders. I wrote two-way mapper with the help of Attributes, that mapped a Datarow to an entity object and Datatable into IList vice versa. Later when we learned about Linq2Sql I found that Linq2Sql mapping was also done the same way as I used to do.

In the second case, I wrote a logging module which was then superseded by Log4Net.

But sometimes I feel one should try to re-invent the wheel so that you learn from it. I'm often in situation where I'm hunting for interesting problems that I want to solve them to improve on my skills, knowledge and understanding of given technology or platform.

While in classic-asp days, you had to maintain the state of your forms manually, I once thought I'll write my own utility to persist the form-state across post-backs [at that time there was no term as 'postback'], I gave up this idea along with the first release of asp.net.

Answer 14

A full-text search engine.

Years later I've read about the inner workings of full-text search engines, realizing I had essentially re-invented them all over (Boolean queries, fuzzy search, proximity,...)

Every now and then I fall upon an old software project of mine, realizing most of it was just wheel-reinventing. Things that took me weeks could now be done in hours, using of-the-shelf open-source software components (that existed at the time...)

Answer 15

I'm too lazy to reinvent anything.

Although before we were able to get jQuery into our application at work, I reinvented quite a bit of that javascript.