Nothere is now no longer in its previous undisclosed location, and is now in the co-location facility provided by my good friend Paul Fisher (read: his on-campus apartment). Weee!
I'd like to thank those who previously housed the server, as well as those currently housing it. A man's server is his castle, and without it, well... can he be rightly called a man?
I'm happy to announce that development has begun on C4, a networked Connect-4 system. It'll be a client-server model, allowing for custom-built clients.
The Society of Software Engineers lab at RIT has history as a place where software engineers and various other computing majors would bum around between classes. Among other things, Connect-4 was a popular time waster, and informal ladder tournaments sprung up around it. A handful of us would play regularly, and some of us were getting pretty good. Then came coops. George Adams was one of the top players, but he is currently off at Primavera until spring. Since we can't play Connect-4 in person, we've decided to code our own. Why not use an existing implementation, you ask? Because we're friggin' Software Engineers, damnit. Because we can.
The current plan is to have a java server that clients can connect to to play. It'll keep track of the game, and have a pretty simple network api. This is what we're writing first.
The clients can be written in whatever the programmer wants to write them in. They can be command-line, gui, web-based, or whatever. I'll probably implement a very simple java command line version to be sure it works, and then move on to do a nice one in Objective-C to get more experience with it. I think George wanted to do a Java Swing or Web-based version. The beauty of this system is that we can all do whatever clients we want, and add whatever features to them that the server API allows. This is a programmer's program.
The primary purpose here is to have fun developing, but a secondary one is to have some well written, documented, and tested code that I can show to the public (and more specifically, those members of the public with shiny employment opportunities). The code isn't terribly complex - nothing that a CompSci III student couldn't do, given enough time, but the development process - managing a two person team, source control, documentation, design - these are the things I'd like to showcase here.
