After a week or two of beta testing and bug squashing, we’ve launched ChessTwit.
See it here => www.chesstwit.com
It’s goal is simple: make it easy to play chess online with your twit friends and I’m pretty pleased with the result. You can login without typing your password (OAuth) and your opponent is sent a Direct Message to inform them. Now we just need to hit critical mass.
From a technical perspective, it’s a fairly straight forward Rails project running on Passenger, with UI written in jQuery.
Where it gets interesting is that chess logic is written in Javascript, which means it can be used on both the UI and the server side validation. The fantastic ruby gem Johnson is then used server side to validate the moves.
I’m a big fan of this technique, so the Johnson gem is a god send. The alternative would be to write the logic twice in both ruby and javascript, something we did on 64squar.es. It works, but it’s a pain if you want to change the rules and great discipline is needed to keep the code bases in sync architecturally. So it worked ok for Chess, but any game where the rules are still in development, or if you want to produce many games it would be difficult.
We’ve got quite a few games apps planned for the future using this technique, so keep any eye out!
