As I’m coding quite a lot GWT and JS has also become quite powerfull in the last years I enlisted the training to learn more about JS optimalization and add some more tricks to my toolbox. Also some real life use scenarios would be very welcome. Turns out Tanadu (a polish “heroes-like” browser game) was implemented 100% in plain JS. Which is quite shocking and as we later agreed on developing such code can really be a pain in the neck. “Use GWT” would be my anwser to such an use case I guess – you wouldn’t loose the refactoring tooling Java gives you and could still fallback to JSNI if really needed. Did the “training” meet my expectations? Yup. Want more details? Read on… :-)

It was really fun and I’ve even (and unexpectedly) met a friend of mine with whom (and one other developer) we’ve paired up and were coding a JS Mortal Kombat in JavaScript for those two days. We’ve learnt how to use CSS3 *-animation, *- transition and other cool new features (well, most of them “webkit only” but very cool nevertheless). Then we’ve coded a little and went on to dinner ate Jeff’s where I’ve lead the group to :-) Sadly dinner took a little too much time and we had less time to code than Poznań during their meeting a few weeks ago.

By the way… MVC in JavaScript is quite weird (hey, most of the teams ended up with GodObjects anyways! ;-)), as is any acting “hey, let’s just say we can have classess and inherit them blabla…”. We’ve seen quite a few examples on how to emulate OOP in JavaScript which was both: really weird and interesting at the same time. In the end, the thought “if you have no type system, in the end you develop your own” seems really true here. I believe this was said by someone from twitter about their Ruby code, which had a hell lot of assertions in it just to be sure “abc is really of type AbcType”. That’s why I’m more for Scalas apparoach than Groovy’s or Javascript/Ruby/Php, but I’m not that advanced in Scala yet to judge it as “super perfect”… ;-)

MK in Javascript using Node.js

On the next day we implemented the serverside stuff, using node.js and socket.io for the clientside wich worked really well I have to addmit. Although I’m still wondering how I’d handle auth/security to be _really_ secure using such server instances (“nodes” ;-))… Finally our game had a very nice and developed state machine for all basic mortal kombat moves (including high/low punch etc, how much such state is blocking and which sprite to use for it, jumping etc.). As this state manipulation took most of our time, our server didn’t support an infinite number of players as some other implementations did but as a trade off they didn’t have any combo/move logic in their games :-) Of course the game was playable (well, “almost playable” – both players think they’re “on the left”, but we’d fix that very quick if needed… ;-)). A quick finishing talk touched some performance tweaks – quite some we should have used in mSejf etc – so I feel a little smarter than before :-) Sadly we didn’t talk too much about TDD using JavaScript which may be really a good idea (ugh this loose typing can make you mad sometimes… ;-)).

Our mortal kombat game ;-)

What could be definitely improved is the internet connection (well, “organization” as a whole I guess) as we had quite a lot problems with it (choose a hotel which is no noob in terms of IT meetings :-)) and the lead’s knowlage about git. Since it’s quite an deep tool, and we’re not here to focus on it but on JavaScript some quick info about how to use it and more developers who aren’t using it the first time in their lifes would have been really helpful. But fear not, I’ve helped out all the teams with learning git and all merges, push/pull flows and other weird problems :-) So it became quite an hybrid training where some of the participants learnt quite a lot about git :-) Some may actually like it in spite of the difficulties we encountered in our very chaotic flow during our hack sessions… :-) On the other hand, any way of introducing git to new people is a good thing, but I fear some may expierience some discomfort/distrust to a tool they’ve just “learnt” on a “fly by basis”, from… well, me – another participant. ;-)

From my perspective it was a great and fun meeting and I’d like to attend more such meetings, sharing the same  formula, or slightly improved. What I loved was of course the hacking and fun of working in a team + teaching people git… :-) If you’re hungry for some team coding you may want to checkout one of the upcomming meetings or wait for SCKRKs + PolishJUGs “Code Retreat” that we’ll be announcing really soon… :-)

PS: I’ve pushed our game implementation (less than 8h of real coding (rest of the time was talking/presentations/eating etc ;-)) to github, here: https://github.com/ktoso/mk-javascript so you may want to take a look. Event out of pure curiosity :-)

Hi there, below is the (horribly trashy and chaotic – as it was hacked up in about 2/3 hours) source for my Google Gmail Contextual Gadget.

It extends Gmail by parsing all links passed in an email, and if an github commit link is found it displays the diff for this commit. With coloring etc – just as github would. It’s really fairly easy to get this kind of things going, and if your working with Google Apps (using gmail in your domain etc) you can use this, and many more gadgets (though I didn’t find much of them really useful – that’s why I’ve written this one).

The source can be downloaded, and fixed (which I hopefuly will have time to do! As it’s a mess, let’s say, “proof of concept”): http://github.com/ktoso/GitHubDiff (It’s on the MIT license).

Read the full story to see instalation instructions as well as documentation links…

HOW TO INSTALL:
It can be installed by your own into gmail, if you’re running on Google Apps -just by creating an new Application on the Market and then adding it to your Account. If you’d like me to polish and publish this to the Google Enterprise Market – you’d have to fund me the publish fee, 100$… ;-)

DOCUMENTATION:
Contextual Gadgets: http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/gadgets/contextual/

jQuery – getJSON: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/
GitHub API – http://develop.github.com/p/commits.html

LICENSE:
The source is MIT licensed, feel free to use it as a base for your own projects etc. It’s nothing particularly well written etc ;-)

Enjoy github in your gmail – two amazing webapps in one… :-)