Jonathan Weiß

... just rock!

Yesterday they announced Diablo 3 at the 2008 Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational in Paris!

Screenshot from the gameplay video

Here are some facts I figured out.

• Five different characters (all in male and female version) can be played.
• A new, inhouse developed 3D engine is used together with the Havoc Physics engine.
• You will be able to return to Tristram.
• The game will offer an interactive environment that can be modified (e.g. destroyed) by the player or scripts.
• The new version of the Battle.net (which will be introduced together with Starcraft 2) will be used for Diablo 3.
• It will contain more than 100 different monster classes.

For more information check the official FAQ.

Diablo 3 is the other game beside Duke Nukem Forever that I can not wait to be released. :-)

During the webinale 2008 we had a conference stand next to our co-workers from the 1&1 human resources department. This was great since they had this nice Nespresso machine and supplied us with free coffee all the time. ;-)

back row (l.t.r): Fabian, Andreas, Sebastian
front row (l.t.r): Jonathan, Martin

We already wrote a lot on our official blog, so here is just a quick overview of our sessions:

Monday, the 26th of May: Power Workshops

1. GUI Development with qooxdoo
   Sebastian Werner and Fabian Jakobs
2. Web Application Development
   Sebastian Werner
3. Browser Object Model and qooxdoo Animation
   Alexander Back and Jonathan Rass

Wednesday, the 28th of May:

1. Web Testing
   Thomas Herchenröder
2. Advanced Object-Oriented JavaScript
   Andreas Ecker
3. JavaScript Tooling
   Fabian Jakobs
4. qooxdoo - Killer Applications for all Browsers
   Andreas Ecker

The conference was great: we saw interesting sessions, met nice people at our stand and learned much about presentations. We will probably come back next year. ;-)

"Design Patterns" in Dynamic Languages

• Language: English
• Speaker: Neal Ford

Software architect Neal Ford gave a wonderful presentation about how easily goals of the design patterns from the Gang of Four can be reached using dynamic language features.
He pointed out that these patterns build another language on top of C++ to make it »suck less«. Today, with the abilities of dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, Groovy or JavaScript (yes – you did not thought that, do you?), you do not have to build this helper constructions to solve the problems the design patterns were made for.
I can not tell you much about this session since I stopped writing and just enjoyed listening to Neal shortly after he began speaking. Just watch his slides and look at the examples to get the idea.

Getting Real - der "Weg" der 37 Signals

• English title (might be): Getting Real - 37 Signals' "way"
• Language: German
• Speaker: Frank Westphal

Extreme programmer Frank Westphal talked about his work with the 37Signals and their "way" of work.

• The gorgeous Signals' book "Getting Real" is available for free online. Cool! :-)
• Development should be done in a iterative way: launch quickly and listen to the users' feedback.
• Small companies can not keep up with the arms race of bigger companies which fight each other with features. Those companies can only build less (to save time and money) but concentrate on the essentials.
• Build the interface first and work with an HTML prototype – not with a Photoshop file.
• A project has four main factors: time, complexity, quality and budget. Launch when time or budget is gone to keep your quality.
• Let the users solve their problems in their own way, no not force them.
• Scaling will be a problem at last (if at all). Frank did not mention it, but in the future scaling problem can be solves using a cloud hosting platform like Google App Engine or Amazon S3.
• »Specifications are wish lists created at the completely wrong time.« — I never liked a sentence so much. :-)
• Implement small but difficult details later.
• Admit mistakes or failures to the public to create confidence.

I totally enjoyed this session! It must be wonderful to work in this lightweight, iterative way on projects.

Silverlight-1.0-Anwendungen mit JavaScript entwickeln

• English title (might be): Developing SilverLight 1.0 applications with JavaScript
• Language: German
• Speaker: Oliver Scheer

On Monday, the 26. May, Microsoft Evangelist Oliver Scheer talked about programming SilverLight with JavaScript. Here are my thoughts about his presentation in order of appearance:

• The Skeleton structure of a Silverlight application reminds me pretty much of a qooxdoo skeleton: one HTML file, one loader JavaScript file and the actual code as second (or more if you use parts) JavaScript file(s). The only difference is that in Silverlight a XAML file is used to store the UI description.
• A funny thing that I noticed: the example website, tafiti.com, does only work correctly in "emulate IE7" mode.
• I do not like Microsoft's naming conventions inside XAML files (e.g. LeftButtonMouseDown).
• It is really nice that Visual Studio offers Intellisene for JavaScript files, but I am not sure how powerful this is. There are several IDEs with similar features, but they all get stuck when a JavaScript framework is used that extends the native classes or brings in it's own inheritance "syntax". By the way: this is the reason that qxDT is currently developed. qxDT is an Eclipse extension based on JSDT which will enable validation, code completion and more in Eclipse for qooxdoo projects. I will write more about this as soon as I have some time. :-)
• Anyway, to enable Intellisense you have to download and add some JavaScript files from codeplex.com. Then you have to convert every SilverLight object into a JavaScript object before you can use Intellisense. There are three problems with this solution:
  1. After this conversion you will use a different API than before. You can edit this Intellisense.js to make the API look the way you want, but it is still different from the native API.
  2. Since you use a different API you have to keep this JavaScript files in your project if you deploy it. Even if an optimized version of this converter exists you still have to use a third-party-component in your project.
  3. Every convert call is costly and I have not seen a possibility to cache the converted objects.
• Oliver did not mention if this is going to change with SilverLight 2.0 and I am really interested when Microsoft is going to do enhance Intellisense to work out the box with SilverLight.
• The presentation itself was pretty good. I would have preferred to see a bigger coding part instead of showing how easily GUIs can be build, but since this is an advantage of SilverLight I do not want to complain.

This post is dedicated to the one who brought so much joy, action and laughter to our family. The faithful soul who slept to my feet for over ten years. I can not imagine coming home without you greeting me.

Robby
Summer 1995 – 01.06.2008

We will never forget you!