Re: [Bug-gnubg] Web version of GNU Backgammon

[Theodore Hwa]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2019, Guido Flohr wrote:

> Back to backgammon: I know that it would be very hard to cleanly separate the 
> UI and the engine part of GNU backgammon. Most of the code was written at a 
> time, when MVC or MVVM
> patterns were still unknown.
>
> But it should be feasible to add preprocessor directives and change the build 
> so the so that you can conditionally compile and build a headless version of 
> the engine. I know,
> there is already a telnet interface to gnubg. Only from my experience with 
> another project https://github.com/gflohr/BaldLies I remember that the telnet 
> interface is not
> exactly nice to use. It probably needs some polishing and formalization in 
> order to turn it into a protocol that is easy to use.

Gnubg is already like this, more or less. There are #ifdef USE_GTK 
(something like that, don't recall the exact name) that delineate the use 
of GTK.  That made porting it to the web relatively easy, since I could 
compile without that option. Not that much change to the code (besides 
entirely removing the gtk* source files) was needed to make it work with 
Javascript.  In the web version, what's running in the background is 
essentially a headless version of the engine.

Ted