push.cx
Peter Bhat Harkins
Breakdowns
When Jim asked me how many hours I could put to So Play We All this week, I said “Negative three”. That turned out to be pretty accurate, as I managed to drop on the floor all but the three most important things for my week. Unfortunately, Oaqn didn’t make that top three so I sent $20 each to Jim and Luke. So, let’s look at what I funded this week.
Luke had writer’s block, so there’s not a lot to say there. I’m a bit puzzled that he doesn’t say “coder’s blocK” because the hours are budgeted towards that, but I can see how it’d be easy to open a code editor and then stare at it.
I’ve chatted with Luke a bit about his game design and thought it was pretty solid, similar to stuff I’d seen on Three Hundred Mechanics . This really sounds like he’s trying to see the entire design up-front and getting overwhelmed by it. His big questions are all certainly important ones, but maybe it’s worth figuring out if there’s a way to take smaller bites.
Jim’s got his first progress that doesn’t sound to me like he’s reinventing a wheel. The template for a page is broken down into DisplayRegions, each of which has a Controller (“Component”) responsible for loading the right data.
It’s an interesting PHP-styled take on MVC. The top-level code that handles each request isn’t a controller action, it’s basically a template split into code/settings (“DisplayEngine”) and markup (“PageTemplate”). The template then lists what controllers and actions should be invoked to handle the request, which is a not how I’ve ever seen any web MVC work before. It feels pretty stereotypical of PHP to have a template running the show, and I wonder how much logic is going to leak into them as a result. A common pattern is that a section of a page with links to register and sign in — or, if there’s a user logged-in, to edit account settings and log out. Jim, in your system, where does that if (logged_in()) { [settings/logout template] } else { [register/login template] } live?