cananian

Over the 4th of July weekend, I released SDR 0.5, now with a GWT/GAE frontend you can check out at square-dance.appspot.com. It's still incomplete -- breathing and collision resolution need to be hooked up, it doesn't do "centers X sides Y" yet, and it's missing lots of call definitions -- but at least there's something tangible to play with that doesn't require mucking around in a javascript shell. Progress!

(Oh, and if you click '+' and then 'Add to Home Screen' when looking at square-dance.appspot.com in Safari on your iPhone, you get a cute "there's an app for that" mobile version.)

I released SDR 0.4 last night (while watching a fabulous Woz on Dancing With the Stars), and JDoctest 1.4. SDR's release mostly signifies that I'm finally moving on from the breathing code; JDoctest has a number of minor improvements.

I've released Square Dance Revolution 0.3. It still doesn't do anything terribly useful yet, but its square dance engine can do a partner trade now (barely). Contrary to the advice I always give others, I haven't developed SDR in the "crappy first draft, then refine" style -- since it's primarily for my own enjoyment, I've spent lovely leisurely hours playing with grammars, grammar generators, doctesting, drafting 3d models of Baypath Barn, and other such fun stuff. It's classic cathedral development: it may take years of off-hours, but boy will it be lovely when it's done!

The Python doctest module is really great: it makes it easy to simultaneously write test suites and demonstrate the usage for your modules. Python's interactive interpreter is key to its coolness: it's really easy to load the code you're working on, type some examples at the prompt, and turn the session into documentation and a test case.

I've been dusting off my Square Dance Revolution project, written in Java, and I thought: gee, it would be nice to use doctests here. A bit of inspiration from doctestj and Rhino, and a bit of elbow grease and: voila! JDoctest is born!

JDoctest is a Javadoc plugin which implements doctests by calling out to the Rhino javascript interpreter. Rhino's interactive javascript session makes Java as fun to program in / debug / test as Python is. (Rhino makes it easy to call between Javascript and Java.) Copy and paste those examples into javadoc comments, add a @doc.test tag, and you've got a test / use case example. I've added hooks to google-code-prettify to make the output beautiful, too.

Here's a simple example using JDoctest, and the SDR sources are now filled with more complex examples (for example). (New SDR release soon, I promise.) Enjoy!