Conway's Game of Life

This is a quick sample project implementing Conway's Game of Life on top of the Play 2 "mini" framework. It is client-server: the gameboard is all HTML and uses JQuery to communicate to a stateless REST server that contains the logic.

The HTML template is Twitter's Bootstrap project.

How to run this sample

• install sbt 0.11.2 if you do not have it already. You can get it from here: https://github.com/harrah/xsbt/wiki/Getting-Started-Setup

• execute sbt and then compile to build the project

• execute sbt and then 'run' to run the built-in development server

• execute sbt assembly to generate a jar distribution

A few interesting things about this implementation

The main app is written in Java, the tests are written in Scala. The app is in Java because:

1. it's more universally understandable, and may be interesting for others.
2. I was kind of curious how Play2 (or at least Play2 Mini) worked with Java, being a natively Scala-based framework.

The tests are in Scala because:

1. Scala is more fun to write
2. It is quicker to write
3. With ScalaTest, it can be done in a way that is at least as readable, and quite possibly more readable, than Java. This is not always the case for Scala: It's easy to write Scala code that looks like Perl++. In general, I think anything that makes tests quicker and more fun is A Good Thing, as long as it's still readable.