Wednesday, April 28, 2010

RightJS vs. MooTools In The Game of Mines

This weekend I had some fun implementing the good old game of mines using RightJS. The result is pretty cute, you should check it out. No, really, you will like it.

The thing is that about year and a half ago I implemented the same exact game using MooTools, you can check it out over here, and well, I have some words to say on this regard.

Okay, I certainly did get better during this last year and you might say that I know RightJS better than MooTools, but here are some numbers. (For the sake of a clean experiment I specifically didn't look into the old code before or during the development and eventually gone in a different approach in the implementation.)

With MooTools I was working on the game almost the whole week, I didn't work full time and as I recall it you could say it were good three, three and a half days of work. The result is 14k build of JavaScript + about 5k of CSS, which is about 19k in total.

In case of RightJS it took me about 6 hours to implement the whole thing from top to bottom, and the result built of JavaScript + CSS is just 9K of code.

Yup, a twice as compact result and about four times less time spent. More of that I believe that RightJS implementation has much cleaner and easy to understand code.

The really sweet things in case of RightJS were the number extensions, simplified collections processing and built in Observer unit. It feels so good and natural to implement game logic with them! I really enjoyed those things!

Well, that's about it.