HINK - A node.js experiment
---------------------------
Hink replicates a child's game called Hink Pink, where a puzzlemaster gives another
person a riddle, and then tells them how long the solution must be. The answer must be
two words that rhyme, and each must have the same number of syllables, and that
number must be the same as the puzzlemaster specified.
This is a small project that does the basic functions of an application using
node.js in an attempt to be simple enough to learn and to extend for a person
beginning to use node.js. It is not an attempt at production quality code.
The reason that I chose this project was because it would be an excellent choice
for an online game requiring mostly high concurrency. The hardest work of the app
would be fetching and storing riddles and answers. An asynchronous engine like node
would be able to keep many connections going at the same time.
Postgres is a less obvious choice, but the ease of SQL is too great to be ignored.
Prerequisites
-------------
You will need node.js, npm, and Postgres. This was built using Linux, but presumably
it will run on any platform that can run these programs.
Installing
----------
This uses npm, so just run to get the dependancies:
% npm install
Configuration
-------------
You will also need to do several things with Postgres (you will find an example in DatabaseInitialization.sql):
1. Create db and tables
2. Create a user
3. Create a table
4. Modify the environment config to specify connection string
To do the last step, create a file called environment.config.js containing an object like below.
HpEnviron = {
hpDbConnString: "tcp://<username>:<password>@localhost/hinky"
};
Tests
-----
Hink uses Vows as its testing framework. Under the tests folder, you can run the tests just by
passing the filename to node, like this:
% node hink-data.js