Danny Jo | Author Archives

Tower Game – Dev Blog Entry #1

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Daniel

The last week or so I’ve been playing with the idea of writing a SimTower clone, naturally I’ve been looking at using libgdx for this and during the weekend I took the first couple of steps. I’ve decided that this will be an open source game so expect to eventually see a github page or similar for this.

What did I actually accomplish during the weekend then.

Basic framework for the game
Simple loading screen for loading assets
Window framework working using libgdx scene2d
Basic modding support started

As you can see I’ve started on modding support, I thought that if I build this in from the beginning I won’t have to worry about this in the future. I might even go as far to say that modding support will allow you drop your own jar file in place to hook into code rather than just changing graphics and properties. So far the modding framework allows you to define the placeable objects but will hopefully grow into a fully fledged modding framework.

That’s it for now, unfortunately this first post wasn’t the most fulfilling in terms of information but I will keep going on this blog with more entries. I aim to do at least 1 possibly 2 entries every week.

SmartGWT sort order on items in SelectItem dropdown

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Daniel

As of the start of May I’ve got myself a new job, I’m now working for Isomorphic Software developing on the SmartClient framework which is a set of components for building rich web applications. Not to bore anyone with details about how extensive the framework you should just click the link and go have a look for your self.

Now onto the actual subject of this post, adding a sort order to a SelectItem used on a form. I wanted to ensure that a select box had it’s items sorted to make it easier for the user to find the item in the list, the items come from a second datasource as a simple select from query. On the SelectItem API you will find a method called setSortField(String) which allows you to tell it which field to sort the items in the select box by.

final SelectItem selectItem = (SelectItem) form.getField("teamId");

if (selectItem != null) {
    selectItem.setSortField("name");
}

You can see in this small snippet that I’m checking to see if the selectItem is null, this is because the form I’m using here has dual purpose to edit different datasource and sometimes the SelectItem won’t be there but if you know you always have a SelectItem there should be no need for that check.

Velocity EU Conference 2012 – Day 3

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Daniel

Finally we entered day three of the Velocity EU Conference, this as it turns out was my last day at the conference. It started out just like day two, a few short keynote speeches in the morning and three tracks of 40 minute sessions in the afternoon. This day had two tracks about operations and one track about website performance. I ended up spending most of my time listening to different talks about web performance, there were some really good ones from companies such as lonelyplanet, SoundCloud and Orange. There was also a really good talk on HTTP 2.0 and how that will improve the performance of HTTP requests.

However, my favourite talk of the whole conference I’d have to say was given by Ashraf Samy Hegab, he gave a great talk on mobile gaming and more specifically on how you could reach more users by having a shared network code base using Javascript and then only providing the rendering specific code on the native devices. What I really loved about his talk as well was his enthusiasm about the subject. Obviously I’m here giving Ashraf lots of praise especially cause gaming and game development is very close to my heart.

You can check out Ashraf’s site at SoftPoetry, excellent stuff.

So in his talk at Velocity, Ashraf demoed PhoneWars, a third person 3d cross platform shooter he’s working on. Download on your android, join the battle as an android phone, download it for your iphone and join the battle as an iphone, brilliant. During the talk there were 30+ people online shooting at each other and the beauty is that all this is happening over websockets in WebViews on the phones connecting to a nodejs server, how amazing is that.

Anyway, enough about that, I do however really recommend you go check out PhoneWars and Ashraf’s site. To bring us all back down to earth I just wanted to give my conclusion of Velocity, like I said this was my last day although my first time going to Velocity. Overall I think its been absolutely fantastic, I’ve picked up some great stuff from tons of really brilliant people, I’ve had a chance to chat to many different people and companies. The only remarks I think I would have is how time was used and how everything was planned. I think that they naturally tried to squeeze as much as they could into it all over these days and therefore you had the different tracks with performance and operations etc. however it’s very painful I find to sit down and listen to someone talk for an hour and a half without a 5 to 10 minute break in between. No offence to any of the speakers they were all great, regardless of the fact that some of the topics might not have been that interesting for me personally.

I think I will just stop there, I would really like to attend the next Velocity conference which I believe will be held in June 2013 in Santa Clara, USA, I could be wrong though. Even if I don’t attend that I’m pretty sure I will attend the next Velocity EU either way.

Velocity EU Conference 2012 – Day 2

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Daniel

It’s late and day two of the Velocity EU Conference has come to an end, today was filled with loads of exciting stuff such as BBC’s story of how they geared up for the Olympics or how Facebook’s mobile app went from being native to html5 and then back to native again and why. We also received talks on jank, yes jank, in websites. It’s more commonly known as stutter you notice while scrolling or seeing animations on websites. I also went to a talk about RUM (Real User Monitoring) which covered ways of using the navigation timing API in Javascript to gather some really cool and useful statistics about the end users visual experience of your website.

Other than talk about things there has also been some good networking around all the sponsor booths. Everyone seems really nice and open and it’s very easy to just walk up to someone and say hi and then just chat about stuff. The sponsors have also been running competitions and giving out free stuff such as t-shirts, USB memory sticks and soft cuddly toys.

Overall I’ve had a good day, I really enjoyed listening to the talk by Jackson Gabbard at Facebook, it covered how the Facebook mobile application went from being a native application to an html5 webview application and then back to being native and why. Just to sum that up, its because they love their users and they want to provide the best user experience. Of course Facebook are not perfect or experts at creating mobile apps and I think it’s safe to say Jackson admitted that, maybe not in clear text, but the message was that they are learning and evolving their app just like any other business.

At the end of the day there was more mingling in the sponsors lounge combined with some bites to eat, drinks and live music. Good day!

Velocity EU Conference 2012 – Day 1

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Daniel

Just to give some context on where I am and what I’m doing at the moment, my employer Trader Media Group also known as autotrader.co.uk have sent me down to London to attend the Velocity EU conference. This conference is all about web and more specifically about performance, speed, how can we make our websites faster and how do we monitor them and predict failures to ensure they don’t have outages.

So what I wanted to do is just give a quick recap of what I experienced during day one. The first day was split up into several “tutorials”, they’re not really tutorials as such you see online, they are more like presentations covering a specific topic. The first one I attended happened to be run by Joshua Marantz, Patrik Meenan and Bryan McQuade with a little bit of help from Steve Souders. This tutorial covered some interesting tools that the guys at Google have spent years creating and improving such as PageSpeed Insights and WebPagetest. Using and interpreting these tools correctly you can get a great set of tips on how to improve your websites performance in terms of end user perception. I won’t really go into much detail about these tools here, you can just follow the links and check them out.

I then attended two talks about ops, for any of you that don’t know what ops is (shame on you), it’s the people and the area of expertise that makes sure we have the infrastructure we need to run our webapplications on. These two tutorials included Escalating Scenarios: A Deep Dive Into Outage Pitfalls and Beyond Desired-State Configuration Management.

The first one, by John Allspaw, was pretty good, I think most of it I had already covered from previous experience though. It covered areas on which teams and individuals need to be aware of in order to perform their best during a crisis or escalated scenario such as an outage. There were many references back to military and aviation and the key message was that we need to learn from other more mature industries.

The next talk after that was about state management and configuration by Mark Burgess, this was a philosophical session, generally talking about self healing systems etc. I won’t go into it that much since it wasn’t really my thing, I suppose there might be some things to keep in the back of your head on where we’re going as an industry but generally not very hands on and actually rather boring as it lasted for an hour and a half.