Programming | Eric Holsinger

My Facebook game, making headway again

Some people know that I’ve been working on a web game that I plan to integrate with Facebook. The initial prototype took a few weeks of halfhearted hacking and thrashing around between PHP and MySql, getting used to LAMP style programming again. I got a working proof of concept up and running and started making notes of what really needed to be done to make it work. Then, I admitted to myself that I was making a giant mess that I would not be able to build on for very long.

I looked around for a PHP framework to make things easier. Something scalable and lightweight, but sensible and clear. I found the Yii framework after peeking at CakePHP and CodeIgniter. I chose Yii because it seemed to make sense to me at first glance. I was able to get my model defined and had CRUD stuff up and running in no time at all.

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Evaluating Vector Tools for Game Art Illustration

I’ve been working on a game project in my spare time and need a good tool for vector illustration. The obvious choice is Adobe Illustrator, right? Well, I wanted to explore my options and see if I could find something cheaper. My primary criteria: Mac OS X and Wacom Intuos4 tablet support. Secondary: some sort of Adobe Flash-like animation for cut scenes would be a nice feature to have available; especially with tweening.

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Game Editor source code released

Makslane Rodrigues finally released the source for his game programming tool, Game Editor.

This is well overdue. Makslane himself has admitted that Game Editor wasn’t lucrative enough and he had to go get a job somewhere else. Once employed, he didn’t have enough time to make game editor into the tool the user base was requiring. Many people, including myself, expressed their frustration with the lack of support and regular release updates.

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Use Game Editor to create a cross-platform game for GP2X F-200 and Windows Mobile

I am going to show an example of writing a cross-plaform game for GP2X/GP2X F-200 and Windows Mobile. I’ll test it out on a GP2X F-200, Palm Treo 750W and AT&T 8125 smartphone. It will also be playable on Windows and Linux, too.

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Instantiating an iReport Collection parameter from an Array in one line

While working with iReport, I wanted to test my report with a default Collection value for my Hibernate Query.

The HQL is something like this,

SELECT person.fullName as personName FROM Person person WHERE person.id in ($P{people})

JUnit Testing JNDI Datasources: Thinking outside of the Container

When it comes to JNDI Datasources, you really need a fast way to test outside of the container without changing all of your configuration just because your testing.

One of the problems with using a JNDI Datasource is Unit Testing outside of the container. Testing in the container is a pain and it’s slow if you are fixing bugs or just testing to make sure what you have works after a few changes. It’s OK for system tests.

Another option might be to have one set of configuration for the container and one for Unit Testing. An example might be to have two files controlled by your classpath or even worse, one file which you comment/uncomment to get the datasource you need. Then hope you package up the right configuration for the release.

What you really need a fast way to test outside of the container without changing all of your configuration just because your testing. Thankfully, spring provides a nice way to test your application outside of the container. Just bind your resource to a SimpleNamingContext mock and voila!
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