JavaScript tooling evolves at a breakneck pace. In an effort to maintain fluency with the "state of the art", I decided to rewrite hangman using contemporary tools.
This is a "rewrite" because I first implemented hangman as part of a web development class at the University of Pittsburgh. In that class we wrote the game in vanilla JavaScript and then wrote it again using jQuery. The purpose of that exercise was to weigh the pros and cons of additional libraries and tooling. For this project, I refactored my old code using modern tools as a way to evaluate newer pieces of the JavaScript ecosystem.
In this version of hangman, the JS is broken down into modules that are bundled together using Webpack. ES6 features (promises, arrow functions, const, etc) are transpiled with Babel. HTML5 canvas is used for drawing the stick figure. Unit tests are handled by Mocha and Chai. The final product is hosted on AWS S3 as a static site. It can be played here.
Note: This game consumes the SetGetGo random word API. This API returns fake words with english characteristics. The API could easily be swapped for another that returns real words (e.g. Wordnik).
To install the dependencies:
npm install
To fire up a development server:
npm start
Once the server is running, you can visit:
http://localhost:8080/webpack-dev-server/to run your application.http://localhost:8080/webpack-dev-server/test.htmlto run your test suite in the browser.
To build the static files:
npm run buildTo run tests in Node:
npm test