We’ve just published code review application built during this year internship @touk. It starts to look as a usable product, though it’s not ready yet and you can still change its shape. Check the freshest deployment and leave your feedback. If you want to get involved as a developer fork us on github!
Gradle promises to hit the sweet spot between Ant and Maven. It uses Ivy's approach for dependency resolution. It allows for convention over configuration but also includes Ant tasks as first class citizens. It also wisely allows you to use existing Maven/Ivy repositories.So why would one use yet another JVM build tool such as Gradle? The answer is simple: to avoid frustration involved by Ant or Maven.
<project root>Have I just referred myself for the 1st time? Achievement unlocked! ;)
│
├── build.gradle
└── src
├── main
│ ├── java
│ └── groovy
│
└── test
├── java
└── groovy
the-appthe-app itself has no src sub-folder as its purpose is only to contain sub-projects and build configuration. If needed it could've been provided with own src though.
│
├── dao-layer
│ └── src
│
├── domain-model
│ └── src
│
├── web-frontend
│ └── src
│
├── build.gradle
└── settings.gradle
include 'dao-layer', 'domain-model', 'web-frontend'Now the gradle projects command can be executed to obtain such a result:
:projects...so we know that Gradle noticed the modules. However gradle build command won't run successful yet because build.gradle file is still empty.
------------------------------------------------------------
Root project
------------------------------------------------------------
Root project 'the-app'
+--- Project ':dao-layer'
+--- Project ':domain-model'
\--- Project ':web-frontend'
apply plugin: 'java'This single line of config for any of modules is enough to execute gradle build command under the-app directory with following result:
:dao-layer:compileJavaTo use Groovy plugin slightly more configuration is needed:
:dao-layer:processResources UP-TO-DATE
:dao-layer:classes
:dao-layer:jar
:dao-layer:assemble
:dao-layer:compileTestJava UP-TO-DATE
:dao-layer:processTestResources UP-TO-DATE
:dao-layer:testClasses UP-TO-DATE
:dao-layer:test
:dao-layer:check
:dao-layer:build
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3.256 secs
apply plugin: 'groovy'At lines 3 to 6 Maven repositories are set. At line 9 dependency with groovy library version is specified. Of course plugin as 'java', 'groovy' and many more can be mixed each other.
repositories {
mavenLocal()
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
groovy 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.0.5'
}
def langLevel = 1.7At the beginning simple variable langLevel is declared. It's worth knowing that we can use almost any Groovy code inside build.gradle file, statements like for example if conditions, for/while loops, closures, switch-case, etc... Quite an advantage over inflexible XML, isn't it?
allprojects {
apply plugin: 'idea'
group = 'com.tamashumi'
version = '0.1'
}
subprojects {
apply plugin: 'groovy'
sourceCompatibility = langLevel
targetCompatibility = langLevel
repositories {
mavenLocal()
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
groovy 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.0.5'
testCompile 'org.spockframework:spock-core:0.7-groovy-2.0'
}
}
project(':dao-layer') {
dependencies {
compile 'org.hibernate:hibernate-core:4.1.7.Final'
}
}
project(':domain-model') {
dependencies {
compile project(':dao-layer')
}
}
project(':web-frontend') {
apply plugin: 'war'
dependencies {
compile project(':domain-model')
compile 'org.springframework:spring-webmvc:3.1.2.RELEASE'
}
}
idea {
project {
jdkName = langLevel
languageLevel = langLevel
}
}
The second keynote of the first day, was Ken Sipe talking about complexity. He made a good point that there is a difference between complex and complicated, and that we often recognize things as complex only because we are less familiar with them. This goes more interesting the moment you realize that the shift in last 20 years of computer languages, from the "Less is more" paradigm (think Java, ASM) to "More is better" (Groovy/Scala/Closure), where you have more complex language, with more powerful and less verbose syntax, that is actually not more complicated, it just looks less familiar. |
| Dima got lucky. Or maybe not. |
 |
| Not much love for Dart. |
The original idea behind JNI was to make it hard to write, to discourage people form using it.On a side note, did you know Tegra3 has actually 5 cores? You use 4 of them, and then switch to the other one, when you battery gets low.
Recently at TouK we had a one-day hackathon. There was no main theme for it, you just could post a project idea, gather people around it and hack on that idea for a whole day - drinks and pizza included.
My main idea was to create something that could be fun to build and be useful somehow to others. I’d figured out that since Confitura was just around a corner I could make a game, that would be playable at TouK’s booth at the conference venue. This idea seemed good enough to attract Rafał Nowak @RNowak3 and Marcin Jasion @marcinjasion - two TouK employees, that with me formed a team for the hackathon.
The initial plan was to develop a simple mario-style game, with preceduraly generated levels, random collectible items and enemies. One of the ideas was to introduce Confitura Man as the main character, but due to time constraints, this fall through. We’ve decided to just choose a random available sprite for a character - hence the onion man :)
Since we wanted to have a scoreboard and have unique users, we’ve printed out QR codes. A person that would like to play the game could pick up a QR code, show it against a camera attached to the play booth. The start page scanned the QR code and launched the game with username read from paper code.
The rest of the game was playable with gamepad or keyboard.
Writing a game takes a lot of time and effort. We wanted to deliver, so we’ve decided to spend some time in the days before the hackathon just to bootstrap the technology stack of our enterprise.
We’ve decided that the game would be written in some Javascript based engine, with Google Chrome as a web platform. There are a lot of HTML5 game engines - list of html5 game engines and you could easily create a game with each and every of them. We’ve decided to use Phaser IO which handles a lot of difficult, game-related stuff on its own. So, we didn’t have to worry about physics, loading and storing assets, animations, object collisions, controls input/output. Go see for yourself, it is really nice and easy to use.
Scoreboard would be a rip-off from JIRA Survivor with stats being served from some web server app. To make things harder, the backend server was written in Clojure. With no experience in that language in the team, it was a bit risky, but the tasks of the server were trivial, so if all that clojure effort failed, it could be rewritten in something we know.
During the whole Confitura day there were 69 unique players (69 QR codes were used), and 1237 games were played. The final score looked like this:
And the obligatory scoreboard screenshot:
The game, being created in just one day, had to have problems :) It wasn’t play tested enough, there were some rough edges. During the day we had to make a few fixes:
These were easily identified and fixed. Unfortunately there were issues that we were unable to fix while the event was on:
All in all we were pretty happy with the chosen stack. Phaser was easy to use and left us with just the fun parts of the game creation process. Finding the right graphics with appropriate licensing was rather hard. We didn’t have enough time to polish all the visual aspects of the game before Confitura.
Writing a server in clojure was the most challenging part, with all the new syntax and new libraries. There were tasks, trivial in java/scala, but hard in Clojure - at least for a whimpy beginners :) Nevertheless Clojure seems like a really handy tool and I’d like to dive deeper into its ecosystem.
All of the sources for the game can be found here TouK/confitura-man.
The repository is split into two parts:
To run the server you need to have a local MongoDB installation. Than in
server’s directory run:
$ lein ring server-headless
This will start a server on http://localhost:3000
To run the game you need to install dependencies with bower and than
run
$ grunt
from game’s directory.
To launch the QR reading part of the game, you enter
http://localhost:9000/start.html. After scanning the code you’ll be
redirected to http://localhost:9000/index.html - and the game starts.
Summing up, it was a great experience creating the game. It was fun to watch people playing the game. And even with all those glitches and stupid graphics, there were people vigorously playing it, which was awesome.
Recently at TouK we had a one-day hackathon. There was no main theme for it, you just could post a project idea, gather people around it and hack on that idea for a whole day - drinks and pizza included.
My main idea was to create something that could be fun to build and be useful somehow to others. I’d figured out that since Confitura was just around a corner I could make a game, that would be playable at TouK’s booth at the conference venue. This idea seemed good enough to attract >Conclusion