A few months ago I got pretty busy when I started school and some other personal projects. Recently, I started another port* which should make HodMod simple enough to maintain and improve that I won't need to rewrite it again anytime soon. I'm moving next week, so it probably won't be ready in the next couple of weeks.

I recently learned about the special holiday mods, so those are going in. Are there any other changes I should make while I'm at it?


*Techie stuff: JavaScript was fun to learn, but it was pretty painful for me to work in it. Maintenance was getting to be too much of a challenge for such a small code base, and too much of that code base was stuff I wouldn't have to write in other languages I've used.

I'm currently working in GWT; Java's not my favorite, but it's well-supported and GWT abstracts away most of the messiness of client-side web development. Of course, if anyone knows a better framework, I'm getting pretty adept at re-writing Hotmod. (I think this is the fourth time . . .)

A real man writes in Assembler.

Honestly though, that's probably about as good as you're gonna get unless you want to jump to Ruby or Python or some other scripted doodad.

Disclaimer: Java is the highest level language I can claim any kind of actual knowledge of, anything else is based off of skimming random articles on programming strewn across the interwebs.

Web applets are fun(ish)!

The trick is finding something that'll run in a browser; GWT actually translates the Java code to JavaScript (which, despite the name, is unrelated). I couldn't find anything that could get hand-coded assembly running on a browser, though.

I considered using an applet, since I could then use any JVM language; Scala, JRuby, and Jython would all be options. I figured GWT would be more transparent and less fiddly for all the users, though. I do wish I could use Scala, since it's so compact and flexible compared to Java. For such a small project, Java isn't too onerous.

Well then, you should just make a different version of your app for every known hardware configuration, duh.

But really, yeah, I haven't used GWT, but my guess is they put a lot of thought into the web aspects of the API, and Java itself is a robust and mature if verbose language.

P.S. I really am a bit out of my depth here, I'm a CE guy, not CS so I think of things like Java as "high level" what with all their run time checking and the like. Personally I'd build custom hardware in Verilog and run it over a simulator. There's some fun string manipulation!

P.P.S. I wouldn't really use Verilog in case anyone was wondering

P.P.P.S. I probably know enough that I could give you a second set of eyes on your code if you want.

I'll put the code up on GitHub once it stabilizes some.

Cool beans. I'll try to break ASAP.