Creating an ActionScript 3 game: it’s all fun and games until it actually has to work.
Over the last 3 weeks, I’ve been trying to recreate Ticket to Ride, one of my favorite board games, in Flash. It’s been a voyage of triumphs and, ultimately, defeat. In this article, I’d like to share the code and my experiences with ActionScript 3.
Google’s AppEngine is a great piece of software. But because of its particular nature, it isn’t always easy to integrate with existing frameworks such as Vaadin. In this article I take a look at how to integrate the App Engine Blobstore with Vaadin. You aren’t able to use Vaadin’s standard Upload component so there are some workarounds necessary. This is just one, feel free to share yours in the comments.
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create your very first Vaadin web application, how to run it on a local AppEngine development server and how to deploy it to the Google App Engine infrastructure. And all of that in about 5 to 10 minutes. Yes, if you have the necessary prerequisites installed, you’ll be up and running straight away. Thanks to the power of Maven.
So you’re ready to learn a new programming language? You might be entirely new to the world of application development, in that case, welcome! Or you’ve might have been creating applications for years, but now you feel you’re ready for something new. Picking a programming language can be a daunting task. There are an enormous amount of options, hence this short and handy guide.
In recent times, there have been a number most interesting Vaadin developments. In this post I’ve picked out 3 that you shouldn’t miss if you’re at all interested in developing cross-browser web applications in a high-level framework. Even if you thought Vaadin was not for you, it might be the time to reevaluate your options.
More zombies, more fun. BlendoGames, the creators of the previously very favorably reviewed Gravity Bone, have just released a new full game. You can get Atom Zombie Smasher right now from their websites. There’s even a demo if you’re not totally convinced yet.
The Cyclomatic Complexity Number of your program is a very rough measurement of how many paths can be taken through your source code. It can be calculated fully automatically. While it is far from perfect, it will give you an idea of how complex your program is. More importantly, it can also be used as a metric for the complexity evolution of a program over time. This post shows how to create this graph using some basic tools.
Get back something physical in this increasingly virtual world. The latest experiment of “I Miss My Pencil” (embedded below) really struck a chord with me. It allows you to store music digitally and still have an analogue way of interacting with them. I had been thinking of ripping my entire CD collection and replacing it with a set of RFID-enabled cards for a while. The idea is that you pick a card, touch it to the reader and the music starts playing. So I set about to figure out what it takes to create an RFID interface.
If you’ve been following the developer community in 2010, you’ve probably heard the term NoSQL mentioned thousands of times. Maybe you’ve heard it mentioned so many times you’re sick of it and might have missed what it’s all about. And that would be a bad thing, NoSQL does in fact solve some hard problems and is here to stay. Don’t worry if you’ve missed the boat last year, there are a lot of great resources on the net to get you started right away.