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Game Blocks

The question is, can I tear the boys away from Minecraft and Halo to try it out?

Game Blocks offers free, open-source game creation for novices

Sheldon Pacotti, writer of the original Deus Ex games and indie developer in his own right, created Game Blocks, an open-source library for making games, for the students in his video game writing course at the University of Texas. Game Blocks is designed to help novice developers craft their stories, animations and physics effects with a simple, snap-to interface, as demonstrated above.

Game Blocks is able to compile platformers, adventure games, simulation games and arcade shooters for PC and Mac, and makes it easy to organize dialogue and story. Best of all, it’s completely free. Anyone interested in messing around with game design or interactive storytelling, download Game Blocks directly from Pacotti’s New Life Interactive.

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Programming

Ember.js

I’m anxious to try this out.

Ember.js – About

Traditional web applications make the user download a new page every time they interact with the server. This means that every interaction is never faster than the latency between you and the user, and usually slower. Using AJAX to replace only parts of the page helps somewhat, but still requires a roundtrip to your server every time your UI needs to update. And if multiple parts of the page need to update all at once, most developers just resort to loading the page over again, since keeping everything in sync is tricky.

Ember.js, like some other modern JavaScript frameworks, works a little differently. Instead of the majority of your application’s logic living on the server, an Ember.js application downloads everything it needs to run in the initial page load. That means that while your user is using your app, she never has to load a new page and your UI responds quickly to their interaction.

One advantage of this architecture is that your web application uses the same REST API as your native apps or third-party clients. Back-end developers can focus on building a fast, reliable, and secure API server, and don’t have to be front-end experts, too.

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News Programming

HipHop VM now faster HPHPc

Facebook’s VM for PHP is now running code faster than the code compiled to C++.

Speeding up PHP-based development with HipHop VM

Here at Facebook, the HipHop team constantly strives to improve the efficiency of PHP execution and increase productivity for our PHP developers. In late 2011 we announced that we were pursuing a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach called HipHop VM (HHVM) as a successor to the HipHop PHP-to-C++ compiler (HPHPc). The goals of the HHVM project are two-fold: build a production-ready virtual machine that delivers superior performance, and unify our production and development environments.

Below is an update on the state of HipHop VM, followed by a deep dive into some details on HHVM’s architecture and optimization strategies.

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Programming

PHP library for database version control

DBV is a library for PHP that helps manage changes to your database. Various open source projects do this in different ways. You can go the simple route of manually keeping a series of SQL files that must be executed in order. One big downside is needing to remember the conventions and following them. Plus, you must keep track of which patches have been applied.

You can automate updates and tie them to release numbers. This is how Expression Engine does it. You just need to manage your release numbers.

Another way to do it is to write a PHP script that detects the database state and executes ALTER statements as necessary. I made a solution like that from scratch before.

It looks like DBV is more sophisticated than any of these solutions.

dbv.php: Database version control, made easy!

Make sure you and your team always have the same schema structure for tables, views, procedures, etc.

Create changeset scripts and queries, commit them to your source control system, and share them with your team.

New changeset scripts are highlighted, so you know your database is in need of an update.

Something wrong with a changeset script? Fix it directly in the application interface.

Not using MySQL, or any other of the bundled DBMS adapters? Writing your own is as easy as pie!

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Programming

Phabricator

I forgot about Phabricator until recently. It certainly has a particular attitude that might be helpful for a medium-sized team I’m on.

Phabricator

Phabricator is a suite of web applications that help software companies communicate about software effectively. It was created at Facebook. Phabricator is also used at many other companies such as Airtime, Asana, Dropbox, deviantART, MemSQL, Path, Quora, and more.

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