Alice Hill
C.S. Magor
Cat Miller
David Brumbaugh
David Chie
Dawn Kawamoto
Don Willmott
Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson
Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Lekan Oguntoyinbo
Leslie Stevens-Huffman
M Noivad
Mark Feffer
nick kolakowski
Stephen Lahanas
Susan Hall
Vincent Chow
Drilling Into JBoss AS’s Successor – WildFly 8
Say hello to WildFly 8, the successor to the JBoss application server and a new JBoss community project. Well, it will be when it becomes available, as currently it’s at Alpha. While change for change’s sake isn’t always a good thing, the reason given for creating WildFly 8 is simple: JBoss the name is overloaded. It refers not only to to the application server, but also the JBoss Community and line of products by Red Hat. To a newcomer to… continue…
StageXL Moves You Easily From ActionScript 3 to HTML5
So you’re an ActionScript 3 developer creating Flash games, but you can see the writing on the wall. Taking a long view, is it time to move to HTML5? If so, what’s the best approach? Here’s a way you may not have heard of, and it’s open source. Although ActionScript and JavaScript are sort of distant cousins, there is an alternative to having to learn JavaScript: You can learn to program in Dart. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able… continue…
Does Scala’s Enterprise Penetration Threaten Java?
Created in 2001 and running on the JVM, Scala has started gaining traction in the Enterprise space because its use of functional and object oriented programming gives it an advantage over Java. It’s quite rare to see software disruption happening. It’s said that you don’t start recognizing a new Hollywood film star until you’ve seen them six times. The same may be true for new programming languages. A mention here, an article there and up it pops on your “Should… continue…
SimCity: How Not to Launch a Game
Unless you live in a cave, you’ve probably heard of Electronic Arts’ disastrous launch of the latest SimCity. It was designed to play for only about 20 minutes offline before closing down. Since cities are saved on servers, not locally, you don’t get to play if the server happens to be too busy for you. Tough luck. Unfortunately for EA, it underestimated the number of people who bought SimCity when the game launched. Kotaku says 700,000 cities were created in… continue…
Understanding Variable Types in Dart
In my first tutorial about working with Dart, we looked at how to use its editor, definitely the best way to learn your way around. Now, we’ll get ready to do some real work. First, A Tip In Tools, Preferences you’ll find an Update tab. This lets you specify whether you want to manually run the Editor, or have it updated automatically. Once you download the editor, go to Help, About and click Apply, Update. The editor’s updated about once… continue…
The Basics of Perforce, a Free Enterprise VCS
It’s hard to believe that as recently as 10 years ago, many bedroom developers hadn’t got into using Version Control Systems. Shamefully, I can remember occasions when I had multiple source versions going and had to struggle to work out which one was the most recent. It was madness and I once lost an important file and then a full day recreating it from scratch. By far the most popular open source VCS is probably Linus Torvald’s Git. But for… continue…
An Outstanding Guide to JavaScript and jQuery
jQuery is open source at its finest. It’s a fast and small JavaScript library that streamlines things HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation and Ajax. It offers a simple API that works across browsers. It’s great. But for those of us who’ve used it infrequently over, the documentation isn’t the easiest to work with. Oh, sure, it’s complete and includes a lot of examples, but it usually takes me an hour or two of Web searching to find… continue…
Learn How to Program in Dart
This is the first tutorial in a series on learning to program in Dart, Google’s alternative to JavaScript. Although no other browser manufacturer has shown any interest in implementing Dart, JavaScript has certain flaws, particularly in maintaining large applications that effectively limit it. Big JavaScript applications are hard to debug and maintain. Google developed its Web Toolkit, or GWT, for developing applications in Java, then translating them to JavaScript. Dart takes a similar approach. You write and test your code in Dart,… continue…
Learn Python Online With Coursera
In a 30-year programming career, I’ve learned and used many languages, but never got around to picking up Python. In this post I talked about taking a free course on “Interactive Programming With Python,” which teaches Python and how to use it to program graphical interactive games. Eight weeks later, I’ve just completed it. If you’ve never programmed before, this is a great way to get started. Along the way you’ll create a series of mini projects, from the fairly… continue…
How to Use a Linux Virtual Private Server
For my development of Web games, I’ve hit a point where I need a Virtual Private Server. (For more on this see My Search for Game Hosting Begins.) I initially chose a Windows VPS because I know Windows best. A VPS is just an Internet-connected computer. “Virtual” means it may not be an actual physical computer, but a virtualized host, one of many, each running as if it were a real computer. Recently, though, I’ve run into a dead end,… continue…
