Software Development from Ryan

KDice Trainer for iPhone is now on the App Store! I worked on making a fast single player version of KDice that captures all of the elements that make kdice.com popular. You play against up to 6 out of 99 bots and work your way from 100th place up to 1st if you’re lucky.

The interface is clean and clear and allows you to configure the type of game (2-7 players, map size, difficult) without a configuration screen. Configuration screens are confusing and often make things more complex than required. In this app there is no configuration screen but instead these configuration options are built into the leaderboard where you select who you want to play.

The leaderboard has 99 bots named after some of the top KDice players. The AI is fairly complex giving each bot unique decision making combinations. As you work your way up the leaderboard the bots get smarter and harder to beat.

The touch screen on iPhones is a natural fit for selecting areas to attack. You simply slide your finger from the territory you’re attacking from to the territory you want to attack. Even with a full map attacking is easy and accurate.

The landing page:
http://iphone.kdice.com

On the App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=310652813&mt=8

Do you want a free copy?. I’ll be giving away 10 (9 left) free copies to people who can promote KDice Trainer for iPhone most effectively (blog post, tweet, digg, etc). Simply email me what you’ve done and I’ll send a free copy to the top 10.

I just ported chapter 10 from my GWT book to the Java App Engine. I’m very impressed with Google’s release today. I had to:

• upgrade Eclipse to use the new Google Eclipse Plugin and create a new Web Application Project
• change the code to use JDO instead of Hibernate since this is what App Engine uses
• click the “Deploy App Engine Project” button in Eclipse

and it was up: http://gwtapps10.appspot.com

I really value GWT for the way it solves the software engineering issues with Ajax and thick web clients. I always discourage selecting technologies based on how quick it takes you to get a app compiled and running from scratch but damn, this is by far the quickest way to deploy a full stack web application using the absolute best possible technologies available (google’s scalable infrastruture, async http, image bundling, monolithic javascript compilation, easy RPC)
Thanks Google!

I’ve attached the source code if you’re interested. Send me your thoughts and updates!
GWTApps-DatabaseEditor-AppEngine.zip

(I’ve removed the jars from the zip because they were too big (war/WEB-INF/lib). You should copy the required libs back to this directory. Use the Google plugin to generate a new App Engine web app and copy the jars from its lib directory.)