Tuesday, 11 December 2007
braindump and a series idea, podcast seed
I’m becoming a better JavaScript’r over these last three days at WDW.
Why? I started working on a WFRP web tool, something simple, and as it got more feature rich, within the context of it’s simple beginnings, so this is not a story of scope creep, I knew exactly what the tool was going to do, but as the code tried to manage the random generation in a growing conditional tree—and no, this is not another chargen [YACG], or “NPC-helper”, but it does inherit from them—I felt the tool needed more object orientation. Where better to turn than Douglas Crockford’s Javascript. Not having Flanagan’s book handy, this has been great. Because JavaScript is not Java. And I’m a Java guy.
Okay, that tool is coming along now, and what about a series?
Well, I only brought one movie with me. No, not Messenger (I was late getting to the airport so I couldn’t stop). Lest I give the idea to someone else, I’ll keep it to myself, but it is role-playing game focused and I might turn it into my podcast anchor and seed as well. I did record my closing bumper with my daughter when she said something priceless...
“...play the scary carnival music, Daddy!”
It was so good, I had her say it ten more times into a mic, knowing then that I was going to use it as a bumper.
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Yes, the YUI. The YUI DataTable made it a "no-brainer" to populate and display a list of information.
I slept on one of the problems I was having that was resulting in this heavy conditional tree: dice. I was trying to make the tool behave exactly like a GM would use it, with a backend model for different sided dice. What was almost 60 lines of code became 10 when I realized I didn't need dice model, just a random index off a matrix. D'oh.
I hope you are using YUI for your OO javascript. I found the YUI inheritance model (including multiple inheritance) greatly simplified my JS work.