Factor app - Preparation

My previous posts covered the basics of programming in Factor. Tat was necessary information to start playing around with the language and you wouldn't go far without it. Now that I've laid a foundation it's time to set a goal and learn towards it.

The goal

What it is and why it's that

My goal for this part of the tutorial is to make a desktop app that interactively visualises history of games of Neptune's Pride. You don't need to know anything about NP except from that it's a game about conquering stars in space. I've chosen this project for a couple reasons:

1. It touches a couple useful aspects of programming in Factor, http requests and UI among others.
2. There is an easily accessible source of online data to test the project.
3. I wanted to do it anyway 😋

It's both something I am competent to explain and something I have motivation for doing. I believe that things learned during this project are also useful in other applications.

What we will learn

I'm going to be learning too!

The project tackles two big subjects I haven't covered yet: UI and http communication. The latter will only be required on a basic level so that's what I will start with. For UI Factor offers an extensive gadget-based system that I will spend a lot of time exploring and explaining, and I hope I will manage to get pretty deep into it in the process. Gadgets are also tied closely to models which are worth at least one article by themselves.

As often as possible the articles will contain actual progress on building the app, so there will be no shortage of practical examples to show how to make use of each vocabulary or concept.

Conclusion

That was a short one

I want to make something and share what I learned in the process, which is the main premise of this blog. All source code will be available in the Esoposting Examples repository on github as soon as the next article is published at some point in the next two weeks. Hope to see you there!