SpedPAC, The Great War and JSON
Just in time for the office elections of the Tewksbury SpedPAC, I was able to finish the data management code for the web site. Now, I need to train the powers-that-be in how to update the site themselves. I’m not finished, of course. (Do these projects ever finish?) The co-chairs want a calendar view into the events list. Once done, I’ll probably have to add a calendar management piece, too.
Since my last post on the subject, I built a new CRT for The Great War and it seems to work just fine. Both sides take losses now and the defender has good reasons to voluntarily retreat. However, the game itself is much too coarse as a model for the war. Two week turns are too broad and the wide hexes with insane stacking doesn’t lend itself to the war of maneuver that the opening months of The Great War saw. I have another wargame called Home Before the Leaves Fall, which has weekly turns of 2-3 day impulses coupled to a 5 mile/hex map. The rules and processes of the game are far too complex, however, so I’m considering building a “mash-up” of OT’s counters with HBtLF’s map.
JSON stands for Javascript Object Notation and is an alternative to using XML for Ajax services. I am in the process of designing a services-based API for my various web sites which will be based on Ruby/FastCGI on the server. The underlying communications protocol between browser and server will use a hybrid XML/JSON, XML on the uplink, JSON on the down. The primary reason is speed and code availability. My web hosting provider does not have a standalone fast JSON parser on the server. (There is one bundled with Rails, but I’m trying to avoid Rails due to a memory leak in their FastCGI dispatcher.) So, I’ll be parsing XML requests on the server (, unless I can persuade DreamHost to install the ruby-json Ruby gem). JSON will be used on the downlink, b/c I don’t want to decode the response in Javascript with the DOM functions. I’d rather just call eval() to convert the response into a Javascript object and query it directly.