jsPgnViewer & stuff

As Google Code had a rather limited set of features to offer when I started this project I really haven’t used their project’s web interface. Up till now I’ve just been commiting changes to the SVN repository and every now and then remembering my password from their page (i wish i could change it somehow). Anyways now they’ve added a wiki page and downloads.

With the downloads part I was quite lucky. I have a script which copies via secure copy the releases to the download directory. I just have to type in make jsr or make wpr. Google has 2 ways to upload downloads (haha) to the project

• Web interface
• Python script

Now I can just basically s/scp/gupload.py/g. Of course more password typing but this means more stable releases . Oh and if you get any errors with the upload script note that it requires python 2.4 (i had to update).

PS. Somebody had added an issue to the project. That was nice, first psot kind of nice.

I have not been too successful on getting feedback about the library and plugin. So what I do every now and then is go through the referers in my access log. I have found wp installations that have the plugin installed or just blogs where the library is noted. I wish people would let me know if they gave it a try and had comments about it.

One post on relbenezon.com is saying that the plugin enables blog readers to play games with the author. When come to think of it, it is an interesting idea. A blog author having some games always in-play. So somewhere on the page there would be boards and if it is the reader’s time to play they could move a piece. If not they could just go through the game up to the point of the current move. So everyone would be able to make moves if they happen to be on the page at the right time.

WebDevLogs.com had a post about the plugin. They had made a static website for a demo. I noted that I could not play the game to the end and clicking moves on the movepane didn’t work. I saw that the PGN that was in the html had all kinds of extra spaces. Right now I had tested the library with PGN files that are exported by programs. This time it seemed to be have been copied and edited a bit. That explained it. I went through the PGN parsing code and made some adjustments. The PGN parsing is more relaxed now and I released a new version 0.3.1. Check the download page.

I promised not to work on the library till January but I didn’t have anything better to do today. As JavaPolis is coming up I went through all the tasks in Aranea changelogic but I could not find anything that I could accomplish in just one day. Yesterday when I was falling asleep I realised that there is an easy way to tackling the only issue I’ve added to Google’s issuetracker and so I started hacking on jsPgnViewer.

The problem was that when 2 pieces can move to a location and no extra information is given about which piece has to move. The decision should be made based on the fact that when moving one of them there is going be check to the king. First I thought I’ll have to go through the trouble of making the move and then rolling it back using the makeMove function that I’ve implemented right now. It was easier than that, just 4 lines of code to make the move on the board and then see if the king is under check.

After that I tested the library with ~2000 Kasparov’s games and ~2000 Adam’s games. Now all the games are parsed correctly. This is a big improvement for the chesspastebin.com.

Stay tuned for other updates, I just might break my no-programming rule again.

I have released a 0.2 version of the jsPgnViewer and the accompanying WordPress plugin. This is mainly a maintenance release fixing/adding problems/features mentioned in the previous posts.

Just go the the download page and get the archives. The upgrade process is simply to overwrite old files. Read through the documentation on using for new way to configure the board.

Before releasing a 0.3 in January the following issues have to be worked out:

• Safari support.
• Incorrect move in a certain situation when two pieces can make the move and the decision should be made on the fact that one move would release a check to the king. See issue #1.
• Code cleanup!

In the meantime I’ve opened up an affiliated site chesspastebin.com. The idea behind it is fairly simple. Whenever you need to share a game and you just want to give somebody a link to it you can paste the PGN to the bin and give the generated URL. Basically it is just another pastebin but for chess.

I’m getting ready to release version 0.2 of the library. I’ll be releasing it on Sunday the 3rd and then I’ll leave it as it is for a month to study for my exams. I hope I’ll get enough feedback turing that time to fix and add requested features.

Firstly I’ve tested the PGN parsing a lot. I downloaded a PGN with about 2000 games and gave my parser a task to go through them. I found couple of bugs in certain weird situations that i was able to fix. In the end only two games were unparseable. One was just broken and the other one required some logic that my pgn parser does not yet have.

Secondly I tried to address most of the problems that Skippy commented about after the first release. The look should be more informative and intuitive now.

Check out the test page and if you have any comments let me know.