jsPgnViewer & stuff

I noticed that there have been couple of hundred downloads of the TRUNK version of jsPgnViewer. I decided to make it into a release. Compared to the previous version:

• Feature:There is a link to download the PGN as a file.
• Handling of broken (unmatched parentheses in comments) PGN files
• skipToMove feature
• Updated to obfuscator – Fixes problems with Opera

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.6.4.

I got a comment about Yahoo chess game format is not supported by jsPGNViewer. Its true . There are about 3 converters out there that convert the yahoo format to PGN. The support request had the game attached and I tried all the 3 solutions. None of them worked. The webbased javascript versions either produced JavaScript errors or did not produce any output. The standalone application run through wine just did not work.

I’m happy to support the yahoo game format (although the name clash, jsPGNviewer ). If anybody out there has a large collection of games in yahoo format I would be interested to use them as a testbed for the new functionality. Drop me a line in the comments…

The only fix in the new version is the correct handling of NAGs (Numeric Annotation Glyphs). So the ?, ??, !? and so forth get correctly displayed now.

I’ve also updated chesspastebin.com. The site has a feed for new games now. Just subscribe to http://www.chesspastebin.com/feed to keep an eye on games added to the pastebin.

I’ve made all the URLs at www.chesspastebin.com more readable. Instead of ?pid=view&id=132 it is now /view/132. Let me know if any of the urls are broken.

I got excellent bug reports from Jan, providing PGN files that were not working with jsPgnViewer. I launched them in my test environment and no errors. I tried in a WordPress installation. Sometimes they worked and sometimes not. It boiled down to couple of “features” of WordPress and tinyMCE:

• There is a HTML entity for “…”. The “…” is used to denote black to move, e.g. 43… Ra8 in PGN files. Well, WordPress editor thinks that the three dots should be replaced by the entity for no apparent reason. Thus parsing broke.
• When pasting games to the WordPress editor and saving the blog post, WordPress or tinyMCE thinks its pretty cool to shuffle the <pgn> tags around a bit and add one extra just to be sure. Well, this breaks the regexes that expect the tags to be intact.

What about a solution? The first problem is easily fixed by the new version of the plugin, which replaces the entity back. The second problem is addressed by letting users use ###pgn## # (three prefix and suffix # marks, the space is because I have the plugin installed) to denote the start of a PGN game and a %%%pgn%% % to denote the end of a PGN game. tinyMCE or WordPress does not shuffle does around, yet.

A issue was reported that certain FEN combined with some moves produced no board. This issue fixes this. Also themes added in the meantime have been bundled with the release. The default WP theme has changed to Zurich. Here is a sample:

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.6 and to the issues list to add feature requests. Chesspastebin.com has also been updated with the latest version.

Disclaimer: I’m affiliated with the product and this might be taken as a commercial but nevertheless things will start to change.

Before moving to Java (mostly JEE) I did couple of years PHP development. The thousand levels of abstraction, tons of third party libraries and most importantly the ever taking change-check cycle were something difficult to accept. I was so used to getting feedback automatically and could not even imagine that one day I will even have to re-traverse some application just to store some state.

For the past months I have been working on team battling the change->compile->redeploy cycle. Today there is a release. It is called JavaRebel and the product brings the cycle down to change->compile->check. Classes loaded by the container can be changed and JavaRebel inbetween will load these changes (adding/removing/changing fields, methods etc.).

When I was working on my Google Summer Of Code project I had to buy extra RAM just to be able to run couple of instances of Eclipse. I was not willing to buy a new CPU to make the restarting these instances of Eclipse faster. JavaRebel does not have Eclipse support but it is in the roadmap.

There is a screencast up that will demo some features of it. Java development will change.

Juan Carlos Jimenez has themed the jsPgnViewer with a Zurich piece set, background images and color set to make it look more like the diagrams seen in chess magazines. Hopefully next release will include the new theme. Here is a screenshot:

After quite a while (last Changelog entry 01.07.2007) I’ve made a new release. This is a maintenance release that was inspired by the two bugs submitted to the issues list.

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.5.6 and to the issues list to add feature requests. Chesspastebin.com has also been updated with the latest version.

Just a bug-fix release. Entities of the sort $[1-6] which represent “!”, “?”, “!!”, “!?”, “?!”, and “??” respectively get handled correctly instead of an exception . The other features that we planned according to the last release’s post’s comments will take some time.

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.5.3 and to the issues list to add feature requests. Chesspastebin.com has also been updated with the latest version.