Choose Your Own Application
This morning I spent some time using ChooseYourOwnApplication. The web site describes it as:
In this session, you will embark on a "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style project where you will make decisions as you develop a Single-Page Application (SPA). You will make technology choices that include JavaScript or CoffeeScript, Backbone or Knockout, ASP.NET or Rails or Node.js, and Heroku or Azure. When you complete your adventure, you will have a fully-working application built with the technologies of your choosing. The best part is, you can keep coding and recoding until you have not one but many incredible implementations of the Single-Page Application.
I went through the first two major sections this morning. I chose using JavaScript over CoffeeScript, Knockout over Backbone, and Node as a back end. In each step of the process you make small changes to the application and gradually make it more and more powerful.
Overall I absolutely loved it. It was easily one of the most fun tutorials I've ever gone through. I plan on going through it again with Backbone (which has very poor documentation imo), and this brings up my only complaint. From what I can see there is no way to start from an earlier decision. You can only restart at the beginning.
Anyway - check it out and let me know what you think.
For me it says, "Oops! We could not locate your form."
Ok, email sent. That's truly weird, but I'm willing to let it slide if they can update the site. ;)
Thanks a ton for pointing this out. It was certainly a silly oversite. We've created a google group for anyone who would like to discuss CYOApp further:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cyoapp
We also maintain a Twitter account if you'd prefer that route:
https://twitter.com/cyoapp
These links (and more) have been added to our "Credits" page as well as our landing page.
The person responsible for the SRT contact form is looking at that as well. It was completely unrelated, but made for a hilarious comedy of errors. See, I'm laughing with you! That's how it works :)
Anyways, thanks for the heads up. I also fixed the code typo while I was at it.
Hey - so any chance of being able to go back and make changes w/o starting over? Ie, maybe I want to switch from Node.js to ASP.Net w/o starting a new adventure.
Possible?
That is actually on our short list of new features. We wanted to get it out before we released at CodeMash last month, but it simply din't make the cut. We are hoping to get that feature in before our next conference in April, but with all the billable work we are currently looking at, I'm not sure it will happen immediately.
The best we have for the time being is to create a new adventure, and just fly through the chapters you've already done. At the bottom of every page, there is a "Download Source" and "See This Changeset" link. You can use those to pick up at any point and continue on.
Thanks for the compliments and the impressions! We saw about a 10% increase in our user base today alone!
-S