[Seaside] Design Question of a very small game

[Avi Bryant]

On Oct 20, 2004, at 10:05 PM, Alexandre Bergel wrote:

> I would like to know a bit your opinion about the code I just wrote.
> It consist in a very small game: the computer choose randomly a number 
> between 0 and 100, and the user has to guess it. For each answer, the 
> computer says: 'too litle' or 'too big'.
>
> It is composed of 5 classes with a couple of method for each of them.
> Do you have a better design for this simple game ?

Well, one thing that's odd is your use of SimpleGame and 
SimpleGameTask.  There's no need to have a SimpleGame that just calls 
SimpleGameTask as the only thing it does - just set SimpleGameTask as 
the root component (put the class side initialize method with 
#registerAsApplication on it instead).  And the way you do this call is 
wrong - you send #call: from SimpleGame's #renderContentOn:, which you 
should never do (yes, it sometimes works, but it has unpredictable 
consequences).  I understand why you did it, but that's exactly the 
problem that WATask was written to solve.  So dump SimpleGame and go 
right to the task.

The other thing that strikes me is that you have no component reuse.  
Both Victory and Loose (which should be Lose or Loss, btw) just display 
a single text string, and could be replaced by a generic component that 
takes the message as a parameter.  And, in fact, for a first version of 
this game I would just use the built in dialogs (using #request: rather 
than GetNumberComponent and #inform: rather than Victory and Loss).  
 From a teaching point of view, that might be a good first step - you'd 
end up with a single method on a single class as the whole application 
- and then you could progress to replacing one of the standard dialogs 
with a custom component as you have now, etc.

HTH,
Avi