UsUnit

There you've got it. The second more mature release of the UnrealScript Unit Testing Framework. A few minor changes to the real framework. More important is a working WebAdmin module.

So far UsUnit contains some graceful code, some somehwta hacky code and some scary code. For the webadmin module I tried to create a better PlayInfo to HTML converter that the one that was already present. Actualy, the existing one couldn't be use in arbitrary places. My converter current supports just check and text types, but also arrays. My initial idea was to auto detect arrays, but because of a bug in PlayInfo's validation code for TEXT render types this can't be used. Instead you will have to use a CUSTOM render type which will figure out of it was suppost to be rendered by the TEXT type. For the TEXT type I also made a special case of numeric values. If the extra data contains range information it will be used to show a specialised text filed with a plus and min button and it will respond to certain key events (up, down, home, end, pgup and pgdown) to modify the value.

An other tricky issue I had to solve was to add some logic to cope with possible invalid test classes. The test class configuration uses strings. It might happen that a single entry isn't a valid name for a class. But during configuration I don't want to remove those entries, or change them at all. Therefor I added a displacement array that keeps track of the array index differences between the two arrays.

More information about UsUnit.

<a href="javascript:..."> rant

Sometimes you want to do some special dynamic stuff on a webpage, by means of javascript. Well apperently a lot of people on this world think that only anchors (you know, thos <a href="..." /> thingies) are the thing for that. Well it's NOT. In fact it's the worst possible thing. Why? well, an anchor should contain a link to a new location. "javascript:..." is not a new location. Besides, since it's already used for dynamic stuff you should just use the "onclick" argument of pretty much every visible HTML tag. And now we ofcourse get: <a href="#" onclick="..." />. Well that's wrong too. Why? because you you create a link to nowhere. People (like me) often open a link in a new window\tab (middle mouse button is some browsers, or ctrl+click). Using a "#" or "javascript:" as link just breaks stuff like this and makes it annoying.

What is the right thing? Well, there are two options:

1. For complete dynamic things that don't open new pages you should do something like <span onclick="javascriptFunctionCall()" >your text</span>, and maye make it more visible my means of CSS
2. When you want to open a document in a special way (like a popup window with special properties) do something like this: <a href="linkToTheDocument" onclick="javascriptCallToOpenWindow('linkToTheDocument'); return false;">your text</a>. This way when a user normally clicks on the link it will call that javascript function with the url. If the user clicks on that link with the middle mouse button (or ctrl+click) it will simply open that link in the default behavior of the browser. The "return false" in the onclick makes sure the default behavior doesn't happen in case of the onclick event. This method gives you the best of both worlds and doesn't annoy users that link to middle click or don't have a javascript enabled browser.

UnrealWiki Developer Journal 17-09-2005

It has been a while since my last dev journal entry (again). First a little update about my last entry. I'm no longer actively working on a VisualStudio AddIn. The features I wanted to add required me to write a VisualStudio Package instead of just an AddIn. Writing a package isn't as simple as writing an AddIn. I hit an issue while implementing the basic framework that I haven't been able to resolve (devstudio gives me an error when I want to load a few things here and there). So that project has been put on ice.

As for other projects, a while ago I continued some development of LibHTTP and got a bit annoyed on my testing class. So I decided to make a testing framework based on unit testing. That's how UsUnit came to life. Because I wanted to include the source file and line where a check failed I had to write an UnrealScript PreProcessor, and I also wanted a few other features that a precompile could accomplish. And that's why I created UCPP. Well, UCPP had some releases, and it quite mature and finished right now. So I've gone back to working on UsUnit some more. I've already made one release so far. But this was mostly to put out the first binary package for people to play with. You could consider it a beta release for now. I want to complete just a few more things for the next release, it can be summed up into: finish the webadmin module.

Also, today barnEbiss contacted me if I was interested in helping him with a weapon mod. His idea is quite interesting. He wants to create a weapon that allows you to create a line of gasoline and set that one fire (the fire ofcourse will hurt people). It's quite an interesting weapon to create, with some interesting implementation issues to solve. So I will also be working on that project.

Well I guess that's all I have to say about that for now.

R.I.P. Free PowerDNS express

PowerDNS express is no longer free. It used to be completely free for pretty much unlimited control over 5 domain names. It's a great service and the interface to manage the DNS entries was clean and simple enough. But because of various reason they can no longer provide the service for free. Too bad, I really liked it. Since my registrar also provides DNS services (my previous registrar didn't that's why I used powerdns) without extra cost I've switched to that one. Thier interface isn't as nice as the one provided by powerdns, but it doesn't cost me at least $8 a year. So here powerdns, some free advertisment in return for those years of free service.