dan_darnell

Since 1997 I have been licensing a version of the card game Klondike Solitaire to online gaming sites. I originally wrote the game in 1997 as a learning exercise. It was, for all intents and purposes, my first Java application. Earlier this year I worked for about a month in my spare time to port the Java version of my game to EGL Rich UI. You can play the game here.

While there may be potential commercial clients for my new game, this is less likely today than when online gaming sites were first springing up. Instead of looking for a commercial audience for the EGL version of my game I have placed the source code in the public domain and it is available here on SourceForge.

Perhaps my code can serve as a learning tool for people entering the EGL programming world. Who knows, there might even be people who want to improve upon the game or use it as the basis for other, similar games.

Over the next few weeks I hope to blog more about the experience of porting solitaire from Java to EGL. Here are some of the topics that I think might be of interest to readers:

• Migrating software from an OO language to a non-OO language. You may be interested to hear just how close EGL is to an OO language and how reasonably it adapts to an OO design model.

• UI elements that are easier to implement in EGL than in Java. For example, using lowest-common-denominator Java technologies required creating my own drag and drop mechanism. In EGL, drag and drop is a fact of life and it is dead easy to code.

• Localization on a budget: How I was able to get reasonable translations for next to nothing.

While some might scoff at this effort being a mere game -- and not "serious" software like order entry applications or something (but you know, I write those too) – I would be quick to point out that I've made money from the Java version of this game for more than a decade now. In my book that makes it business software.<grin> If nothing else though, the same user-interface elements that one finds in games today manifest in all modern web applications and most modern back-office applications. You may not care about games as such but as a learning tool I hope my work is still helpful to you.

Dan Darnell, Consultant