Facebook Trumps

It is amazing how much time I don't have .. it has been two months since the big push lead to th "alpha version"!

At the moment I am working on a different project, a sort of web-forum based around old picture postcards - a favour for my father.

All of this is to gather skills, so anything learnt about building a more conventional web app can be farmed back into Facebook Trumps.

I hope a better version of Facebook Trumps will arrive soon! At the moment it averages about 1 add per day, and I do have some people who have a couple of games a week!

Labels: guice, java, wideplay warp

I read the following from a book on Safari (http://safari.oreilly.com/):

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment- a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

Don't leave "broken windows" (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a "Not Implemented" message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you're on top of the situation.

This seems like wisdom to me and at this point in the project I need to focus on this implications of it. Before I start on adding the new features I need to deploy and iron all the creases out of the current version.

Labels: approach, guice, gwt, java

I now have a "working and complete game component". I am going to deploy it to the server and perhaps get some people to try it. The architecture and logic of the application I am pleased with, however the look and feel of it is quite ropey! I need to engage in a process of gentrifying the game, which due to the component based architecture will be straight-forward.

For the next version of the game, which I would want to be of a sort of "beta" quality I am after the following:

• More on the server-side. I'm already using Guice (http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/), but I want to add things like persistence, for the game scores etc, but also to keep track of users who have successfully accessed the game (just their names and UIDs).
• Look and feel. I need it look more polished, I want to present an option to go "full screen", using a maximized browser window with just a control bar and URL field. Need more ques for the user to orient them to where they are in the game. Especially need to be more clear during opponents turn.
• Iron out issues which arise from testing. I need other people to test it live off the server and see what issues it throws up.
• Client Side Refactoring - I am tempted to make some alterations to the Event code and some major work on the EventCapableComposite which all the View components inherit from. Also to move the framework code into its own package.

Labels: facebook api, guice, gwt, hmvc, java