ChristianDevs Forum

The woot! is celebratory. It is so nice to be able to read through these forums on a leisurely afternoon. My last exam of the semester was this morning, and now I can put more time into getting some game development going. There are quite a few articulate and accomplished people here in the community, very nice to see Christians coming together for something innovative.

I do have a few questions though:

Who here develops in JavaScript, and if so have you tried FBJS (FaceBook JS)?

My coding skills of eight years back or so were fairly good in Java, and I did some web UIs in Javascript ... but I have no idea how the language has evolved.

I'm not going to be doing much coding on our projects, as these days I handle the business and content end of things more, but we are looking to do some facebook apps as the first thing. However, we want to be able to to port to iphone, android, and possibly other platforms. I've read somewhere that android is all Java, but thats fuzzy info in my brain right now - I could be wrong.

So I am wondering if it is worthwhile to work with Java, JS, etc. because of my familiarity or whether I will just contract / train people to work in some version of C?

I was thinking about flash games, but Apple's recent decision closed the book on flash for our projects ... some of my volunteers have minimal flash skills which I wanted to use, but my thought is that Javascript (and Java) aren't too hard to learn, and they have been asking me what to brush up on ...

Comments, advice, input on Java / Javascript are all very much welcome

I used too but found - what I would call version drift issues too annoying,

Love QT - build it static, build it for Linux, Mac and PC.

The only thing I miss about java was a book called

"Head First Java" greatest programming book I have ever read. I was like a puzzle book with programming themes lessons and puzzles.

I have been doing more javascript for my job. One thing I've been discovering is the awesomeness of jQuery.

Another thing I've found to rock my web development world is Asp.NET and C#.

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Q.E.D.

I used to do Java development, but not anymore.

> but I have no idea how the language has evolved

To me, this is one problem with Java. It hasn't evolved much. And I'm fearful it will be even less so in the future. Just my opinion though.

It sounds like you are still deciding what platform(s) you want to develop for. You should decide what your highest priority ones are and from there decide what languages would be best to learn.

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My quote: Have I mentioned I love C# and the iPad?
Another quote: Have I mentioned I love the iPad?

As for initial platform choice: Facebook apps are the first priority, and I see that they have two officially supported libraries, for PHP and Java. So one of those is the choice, as I don't want to get stuck with something partially supported. Maybe being officially supported isn't as big a deal as I thought?

I am sort of worried over what Oracle will do with Sun, with Java ...

Note we're doing 2D stuff, since 3D is just too ambitious for our first set of projects and we want to port to mobile platforms. So I haven't serious considered future projects in 3D .... My thought on that was I would try to make choices now that make that process of porting across mobile platforms as painless as possible. The vision of our group is social media and mobile gaming / content delivery / e-learning - our games are going to be focused on content over graphics.

I've grown used to thinking in terms of the business case, but I do realize that input from developers is gold. I appreciate all the input

Just looked up jQuery ... looks interesting. I have so many things to learn, and relearn.

Sigh, it has been too long since my time in compsci at Queens. One really does loose it if not using it.

I used Java for quite a while, but I use C++ now. I know enough JavaScript to make a dynamic web page, but not beyond that.

I have looked into programming for Facebook but it just never appealed to me very much. There seemed to be a lot of rules to follow.

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"Blessed is the one whose way is blameless, who walks in the law of the Lord"
Psalm 119:1

I've been bouncing back and forth from Java to Flash because the syntax is so similar. I would love to try and develop a project in Flash and be able to translate it to Java to be playable on the Android platform.

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::Tweetle-dee::
"Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good." -- Ecc. 9:18