This is a clojurescript solitaire game built for my clojure presentation at work. At Protacon where I work, I had the chance to hold a presentation about a programming related subject for one of our Lab Days. I chose Clojure, and built this game to both showcase its code and interactive development.
I had the audience connect to the game with their mobile devices and laptops, and would synchronize the changes in my editor to all their clients simultaneously with figwheel. It was awesome and went pretty well.
See the game in action here.
- move cards by first selecting (clicking) a card place, then selecting the place you want to move the cards to. The game will move as many cards to that place as it can.
- double click to move a card to the first available place automatically
- there is a history of 10 moves - click "Undo" to go back and fix your mistakes!
- tests are not available in the production build, sorry :)
- oh, nothing special currently happens if you finish the game
Implement the core game logic in cljc and see if it integrates to the build process more nicely than the old cljx did
I had done one project with cljx, which is the old way of sharing clj and cljs code, before. In that project I had the logic implemented in cljx and compiled to clojurescript. In that case I ran the tests on the clojure side only, and while it worked okay, setting it up was a pain, and mentally grasping it was difficult too.
I was happy to notice cljc has much better support. This time I compiled the tests into clojurescript and created a view that only runs the tests. The benefit of this was that I was able to have my mobile phone as a dedicated test runner / build monitor while I coded on my desktop computer. Awesome!
Another way to run the tests was on the desktop I code on: I had the
favicon of the tests page display 
when the tests pass, and a 
when they failed. This way I would notice the tests failing in another
browser tab too.
I am happy with the tests for the core logic, but I still ended up with a lot of code that is clojurescript only, and has no tests at all. This untested core would occasionally break, and in retrospect I should have implemented tests for it too.
Create and use a working build environment for both development and releasing, with an interactive, reloading REPL and a minified build output.
This I had attempted with the leiningen template called chestnut
earlier. It had some bugs that I cannot remember any more, but this
time I used the default figwheel template and it worked out of the
box. Lesson learned: start simple.
Get something nice done with css
I desperately need some battle experience with css. I'm quite pleased with the outcome. Bootstrap's grid I was familiar with when I started, and I sort of tried things out as I progressed, without a clear plan. Figwheel was an immense help as it reloaded my styles and layout without restarting my game state.
Use core.async channels in the game loop
I knew the basics of core.async when I started, but hadn't realized how versatile it really was. I had thought it could only be used for communication between the view and the view model (if you could call it that), but I found unexpected uses for it. Like restarting my game loop by writing something to a "kill the game loop" channel.
Have a desktop & mobile drag and drop
This I kind of lost interest in. It seems these kinds of things are not that easily done on mobile devices, so I spent little time in experimenting with it. Instead I implemented a scheme where the user should click on a source and target "card place" and the game will just attempt to move as many cards as it could.
While this works for most cases it definitely is not the same thing as being able to move any card in the card place to another place.
To get an interactive development environment run:
lein figwheel
and open your browser at localhost:3449. This will auto compile and send all changes to the browser without the need to reload. After the compilation process is complete, you will get a Browser Connected REPL. An easy way to try it is:
(js/alert "Am I connected?")
and you should see an alert in the browser window.
To get connect cider (in emacs) to this repl, do cider-connect to
port 7888. This connects to figwheel's environment, a clojure repl. To
connect to the cljs repl, see dev.cljs. It does this, namely:
(do
(use 'figwheel-sidecar.repl-api)
(cljs-repl))You have to eval those in the repl buffer, not inline. It doesn't work for some reason.
To clean all compiled files:
lein clean
To create a production build run:
lein cljsbuild once min
And open your browser in resources/public/index.html. You will not
get live reloading, nor a REPL.
Copyright © 2015 Mika Vilpas
Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.