Abiathar Online

The whole Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now?) thing is kind of a big deal, and it a few weeks ago it hit me that I know nothing about programming for that world. There are all sorts of amazing things being created in JavaScript and HTML5, and I have zero programming experience in those. With everything going to the Web, I risk becoming a dinosaur by restricting myself to .NET desktop apps.

So, I gave myself a challenge: create a fully client-side Keen Galaxy level editor using HTML5 and JavaScript. This is both a worthy challenge for me (considering my complete lack of  web programming knowledge, but markedly nontrivial experience in general programming) and will produce a useful result. There are not yet any web-based level editors in the Keen community.

I would be OK with a partially server-side solution (probably using ASP.NET), but there is the major issue of finding a good but reasonably priced host. If it's all JavaScript, I can throw it up anywhere or even let people download a ZIP and put it wherever they want. I plan on using Dropbox's Chooser and Saver controls/APIs to load and save levels; HTML5 currently has no nice way of modifying local files.

Since JavaScript is all client-side and source-code-a-button-push-away anyway, I figured I might as well make this a real open-source project and start using GitHub in earnest. I'll still be using Visual Studio for text editing, and probably Google Chrome for testing/debugging.

I haven't made any progress except getting the critical files together (the VS solution, an HTML page, and a stylesheet), so there's not much to show yet. It'll come together slowly, probably with a good deal of Googling. It's an adventure!