Congrats guys, open source really matters!
First look thoughts:
1. This is definitely not another Nxt fork
2. What's in native libs? I guess the should be opensourced as well.
3. I did successfully run Qora under Intellij Idea by importing Eclipse project in the repo and adding native libs to a project
4. JSON settings are looking cool, but comments are needed, I guess, especially for non-coders
5. Got unsafe memory issue related to MapDb
https://github.com/Qora/Qora/issues/8 . I guess it's better to avoid off-heap operations, for current MapDb state at least. I bet I did read Jan Kotek's article on how to do that.
6. Worse issue, I got not much useful message trying to run a node after crash
https://github.com/Qora/Qora/issues/9 . Verbosity matters here.
7. Code seems to be more clean & easier to read than Nxt at the moment. However, after adding features / patches it could be the same, so have luck guys
And formatting isn't Sun(Oracle)'s standard
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/codeconvtoc-136057.html (the same is true for Nxt).
8. Commented code is not good and not necessary with VCS (the same is true for Nxt at the moment as well)
9. What's the Orders launcher about
10. Any detailed description of Arbitrary Transaction available?
All I can verify is that Nxt vs. Qora looks completely different. Also, Qora makes use of the global "Generating Balance" to determine the block Target. From my scan of the Nxt code, no such value is used. I think there is a bit more randomness to Nxt than their might be of Qora, but I won't stand by that. Qora basically looks at the time since the last block, the forgers personal balance and the total balance of forging accounts. It then uses a fairly straight forward process to test if a block has been forged.
I haven't been able to figure out what Nxt does. This isn't because of poor Nxt coding. It's because I don't have the time to look into it. If a Nxt guru is around, please comment.
You can get Nxt forging algo in slighlty simplified form in my blog
http://chepurnoy.org/blog/2014/10/inside-a-proof-of-stake-cryptocurrency-part-2/ . And I'm going to investigate Qora's forging algo(got no detailed view from first investigation). I can even publish a blog on that if it's interesting, and make executable simulation of Qora forging process(I already made that for Nxt
https://github.com/ConsensusResearch/ForgingSimulation )