CanvasLife is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life using the HTML5 canvas element and JavaScript. It should work on any modern browser that supports canvas, specifically recent versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera. Internet Explorer is conspicuously absent from the list, as it doesn't yet (to the best of my knowledge) support the canvas tag (there are ways around this, but the original point of this project was to experiment with canvas, not to spend ages looking at cross-browser compatibility solutions).
The Start, Stop and Step buttons are used to control the animation, and the Clear button clears the board. Click on the board to mark cells as alive (blue). By default, only the cell clicked is marked; the drop-down box provides more complex shapes, as well as an eraser. The Save button serialised the state of the game board, and places the resulting string in the text box next to it. A previous state may be restored by pasting a generated string into the text box and clicking the Restore button.
The game is included in a web page by creating an block element (normally a <div>) with the ID 'life', and then invoking the script, like so:
<div id="life">
You need JavaScript (and a modern, canvas-supporting browser) to
enjoy the Lifey goodness.
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="life.js"></script>
For a working example, see here.
This software is provided under the MIT licence:
Copyright (c) 2010 Rob Hague
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.