Links: Games written in JavaScript

A few games written in JavaScript recently came to my attention, and these aren't your run-of-the-mill video games either. They're pushing the boundaries of what can be done inside your browser.

Of note is two Defender-style games: Spacius! A Space Adventure (with variable/expandable playing field, and nice sound via SoundManager 2); and, Defender of the Favicon (which renders the full game in the page's favicon, no kidding.)

Also, there's WolfenFlickr 3D which mashes up browser-bound Wolfenstein 3D with Flickr images, and Rockford the Invincible, the dysfunctional Boulder Dash clone written in only 20 lines of JavaScript.

Previously,
Links: Wolfenstein 3D in JavaScript

Links: OpenID

EmailToID is an OpenID to email mapper web service.

Also, on the web today, hints of better OpenID support from both Microsoft and Google. The latter with new evidence in Google Maps code, in addition to early adopter Blogger. I also previously posted a link of the App Engine-powered OpenID provider for Google Accounts. And Yahoo! already is an OpenID provider.

Link: Firefox 3's Awesome Bar in JS

JavaScript implementation of Firefox 3's "Awesome Bar".

Mapping resources: Yahoo! HTTP Geocoder API, Geohashes and Browser-based Geolocation

Links:

• Webmonkey takes a look at Yahoo! Geocoding API
  

  Geocoding is the process of converting human-readable place data -- a city name, ZIP code, or address -- to latitude and longitude points that can be easily plotted on a map.



• Tips & Tricks with Geohashes, another geocoding service, which provides a geohash with gradual precision degradation - instead of latitude and longitude - from human-readable address data.
  
  Not to be confused with xkcd's Spontaneous Adventure Generator.
  
  
  


• Geolocation Redux and a JS Library, a proposal for browser-based geolocation functionality with a JavaScript library to start getting your hands into it. Looks interesting.

Other posts in this series:
Mapping Resources: Google Maps .NET Control, GeoRSS with WCF
Mapping Resources: Mapstraction, Geocommons, GeoCoder.us with C#
Mapping Resources: OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap

Link: Databinding PDFs in ASP.NET

An interesting article about generating PDFs in .NET using iTextSharp, a port of the iText open source Java library written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. And incidentally, elsewhere db4objects releases its Sharpen Java to C# tool for free. It converts your Java source code into C#!

Another C# to JavaScript cross-compiler

Just when C#'s update to 3.5 felt like it's turning into JavaScript (well, a little bit, especially with the new Lambda capabilities), ECMAScript 4 started to feel like JavaScript was heading into C# territory, with more advanced types, and type and objects support, and then some. Anyway, I digress. What I'd wanted to say was what I'd found today, in a rather roundabout kind of way (via John Resig's post about writing ECMAScript 4 with Mascara which recompiles the new ECMAScript standard into classic JavaScript). It's this: JSC, an MSIL to JavaScript recompiler. You write C# code, and I quote, and the application magically appears!

Almost as cool as Script#.

Somehow related,
Ruby love in the browser
ParenScript for the javascript universal runtime

Links for Work: ASP.NETand stuff

I've been busy at work, mostly with taking out the budgeting functionalities in our HR-based Training module and turning it into a standalone web application. This gave me a few interesting architectural challenges as I decoupled the software, and later reintegrated it back into the main product in a more modular approach. Basically, we wanted to reuse the Training module's budgeting component in our Recruitment module.

This exercise also let me play with some of the newer technologies, like LINQ and ASP.NET 3.5 which have somehow fueled my obsession with things like code base reduction, doing things declaratively with ASP.NET, and a new-found preoccupation with performance which in a lot of cases have lead me down the dark path of premature optimization. Anyway, many interesting lessons learnt, and a few more days and I'll be off this project. Here are some interesting links which I've collected:
Asynchronous ASP.NET pages
Using JSON with ASP.NET 3.5
Self Sorting GridView with LINQ Expression Trees
7 tricks to simplify your programs with LINQ
Loading and Executing JavaScript Files From JavaScript, ASP.NET AJAX
Try-catching in a single line of code

Previous work-related posts here on this blog:
Partial rendering without UpdatePanel
Detecting a BLOB's MIME type