Returning to Ground Zero
First, a self-plagiarized recap. This semester at Seneca College I am taking a course revolving around open source development. As part of the course the students (yours truly being no exception) were nudged into getting involved in some Mozilla related projects, produce code for the real world, and see fist hand how the whole open source thing works.
I chose to work on Processing.js (Pjs), a JavaScript port of the Java-based Processing. More specifically, I volunteered to work on porting over the functions pushStyle(), popStyle(), and boolean().
On 19 October 2009, I threw release 0.1 out into the cruel world to fend for itself. Today I present release 0.2 to the world. Applause!
Not new, but shinier!
The watchwords for release 0.2 were: fix it. Release 0.1 included reasonably functional code for pushStyle() and popStyle(), and totally untested and untried code for boolean().
Bringing boolean() up-to-spec was the goal of this release and this was done by throwing together some test cases for boolean(). Bugs were indeed caught, squashed, and flushed down the toilet.
Although boolean() got most of the attention, the elder siblings did not totally escape notice. pushStyle() and popStyle() received their own test cases too. One issue was whether the pop should spit out alert popups if there were not enough pushes. I decided not to use any popups and just have a warning be sent to the console, where most users probably won't notice. pushStyle() and popStyle() were further improved to better handle the library's own variables; before they only managed canvas' variables with any proficiency.
Better to get it when it's pleasantly warm rather than skin-charring hot
What now?
Pursuant to getting my code merged into the Pjs library there are a few instructions I have to follow. So I'll make another post comparing the results of my Pjs code with those of the Java-based Processing code. As I have discovered it is not totally possible to faithfully port Processing to JavaScript. For example, Processing will throw exceptions and refuse to do anything if you try to pass an argument to a function and the function is not designed to accept, say, the variable type of the argument. But in Pjs you have to handle these weird arguments and preferably return some meaningful result. This comes up a few times in boolean(). But more on that soon.
For release 0.3, it looks like I'll have to choose another function to port over, or at least get started on even if I don't finish by the end of the semester. strokeCap() looks appropriately involving.
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