Now onto the actual subject of this post, datasources and the operationBindings tag. Operation bindings allow you to attach, for lack of a better word, an aspect to a datasource operation. This means that whenever a call is made to a datasource which matches the operatingType specified the particular operationBinding will be run by the SmartGWT framework. The operation bindings can be used for more things other than just running a custom server side method.

In my case I was looking for a way of having the data returned by my datasource to have a default sort order and I managed to accomplish this using the orderClause tag inside an operationBinding. The reason for this was that I have a field on another datasource pulling in data from this datasource as it needs to render a selectbox with options being the items from this datasource.

Now lets have a look at the xml.

<operationBindings>
    <operationBinding operationType="fetch">
        <orderClause>name,last_updated</orderClause>
    </operationBinding>
</operationBindings>

As you can see the orderClause contains a comma separated list of column names to order by and that’s it really.

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.

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!

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.

Anyway, Unity provides some great tools and features and development has been pretty quick, I’ve managed to create the main of the game world together with the player spaceship and attached a particle emitter for the engine. All in all I’m pretty impressed with it so far. Hopefully the pace will pick up even further as I gain more skills and knowledge using Unity.

Now on to some more updates, just a few days ago I started looking at including some form of power ups and I now have a first power up (which happens to be a shield) working to about 50% which means its there, the player can pick it up and it renders an effect place holder around the player. I still need to sort out some collision detection for the shield in general play and some simple hit point deduction etc. All good though.

After I’ve got the first power up in place I’m thinking I might focus some energy on explosions. It would be really nice to have some neat effects when enemies and player gets killed, we want things to blow up, maybe a bit of screen shaking and whatnot. That should keep me busy for the next couple of weeks as I’m not able to spend heaps of time on this.

I think that will have to conclude this post for now but hopefully I might be able to post a screenshot of an explosion later on.

Let’s get back to the headline of this blog, I put indie game development because I feel it’s a great topic and there is so much buzz going on at the moment. Especially since this guy Mike Bithell just released his game Thomas Was Alone and he’s got some really nice reviews for it and I just keep hearing loads of good stuff about it. Although to be honest I’ve not tried it for myself yet but I will do once I get a chance. I hope I can have my game available before the end of this year (2012) but I’m not going to make any promises.

Seeing as this game will be my first game I feel really excited, especially after seeing the amount of notice and attention the indie game scene is getting with Thomas Was Alone. My initial plan for my game is to make it freely available for the desktop (anything supporting Java really) and a paid for version for Android but this is not final either and could come to change. Getting down to some fun technical details, as mentioned a few sentences ago the game is being written in Java and I’m using the libgdx framework which provides me access to a heap of nice features including Android support. Other than that there’s not much to mention, obviously I have to put in some conditional logic for Android versus desktop since the input controls are different but that’s about it for now.

For more buzz around indie game development check out the twitter stream.

I spent some time searching around for some ideas on how to do this and finally came across a really nice article.

Have a look at http://olafsblog.sysbsb.de/lightweight-testing-of-webservice-http-clients-with-junit-and-jetty/. It’s brilliant, basically what you do is you start up Jetty internally in your test class and you have your app point at this running Jetty server. You can then in your test case tell the server what to return on the next request, kind of like a mock response in a way.

Thinking about it now, I might actually see if I can create a project for it on Github and potentially add some more good stuff to it. Also to note is that this mock type server would be able to serve as any HTTP endpoint you wanted to stub out, you simply just tell it what to return and it’s brilliant from an integration point because you’re actually firing off a real HTTP request locally.

Give it a go I tell you, it’s saved my a lot of time and effort.

How does the Listify App version numbers work you might wonder, well this is how. The version number consists of 3 numbers, <major>.<minor>.<build>

The major number will increase when there are significant changes to the app, like structural changes to how the app works and its architecture. The minor number will increase when there is additional functionality added, so bugfixes alone won’t increase this number, there has to be some significant new functionality. The build number goes up on build pretty much, this number changes a lot when there are fixes and tweaks going on.

It is very likely that future releases will only contain a small amount of things added, fixed or changed since I try to release small and often rather than bundle in some massive changes, easier for me to test as well.

The following changes have happened for this release.

• List items can now be ordered using drag and drop
• Google Analytics Event Tracking has been added to certain functions

That’s about it for now, there are also a couple of tweaks and fixes in this release.

• Added a favicon
• The page title tag will now be prepended by the list name when on the view list page in order to have nicer bookmark links
• Changed the wording of 4/10 done to 4/10 complete
• Made the inplace edit boxes bigger
• Fixed an issue where typing markup tags < and > would cause the list item to render wrong
• It should no longer be possible to add empty list items

Check out the new version at http://listifyapp.dannyjo.co.uk/