Game of Life in JavaScript

By Alejo Fernández

Overview

This is a sample implementation of Conway's Game Of Life cellular automata written in JavaScript language. The code was created having the following premises in mind:

Separate presentation from the game logic (i.e. allowing the reuse of the logic with a different user interface)
Avoid processing cells sequentially using async programming techniques
Showcase the use of different technologies: UI templating, Async programming, Code modularization, TDD, simple MVC pattern, code linting

High level design

The application was implemented following the MVC pattern. Due to the simplicity of the example I didn't use an existing MVC framework (Ember.js, Backbone.js, JavascriptMVC, etc.), nevertheless I decided to organize the code in different namespaces, classes and files for maintainability purposes.

External libraries

The following external libraries were used to simplify the development of the application and showcase design patterns and technologies.

Mediator.js to implement the Mediator pattern and simplify asynchronous programming.
Prototype.js to enable Class support and utility functions for Arrays, Ranges and Enumerable objects.
Namespace extension for Prototype to enable namespacing support.
Tempo.js for HTML templating support.
jQuery for DOM manipulation.
Twitter Bootstrap for UI styling.
JSHint for JavaScript code linting.
QUnit for unit testing.

Brief component description

Model

The model implements all the logic and rules of the Game Of Life. It consist in two classes Grid and Cell organized in the GameOfLife.Model namespace (/js/gridModel.js file).

The Grid class implements the logic for constructing the grid and handles the process of computing new generations. It holds a collection of cells and exposes a method called nextGeneration() that publishes a notification to them indicating that a new generation needs to be computed.

The Cell class handles the state machine of a single cell, it also implements the rule used to compute the cell status for the next generation. All cells are subscribed to the nextGeneration event published by the Grid, when they receive that event they compute the new status and if it differ from the previous status it notifies the Grid via the cellUpdated event. After that the Grid republishes the cellUpdated event to its subscribers (in this case the GridController).

Controller

The handles the interaction between the UI and the Model. It consist in a single class named GridController exported by the GameOfLife.Controller namespace (/js/gridController.js file).

The GridController class manages an instance of the Grid class and handles the flow of the application according to the user interaction. It receives the cellUpdated event published by the Grid model to apply changes in the UI when the status of a cell is changed. It also indicates to the model when a UI cell was clicked.

The controller also is in charge of retrieving and storing the grid status to/from the browser LocalStorage. The status of the grid is saved to LocalStorage each time the user clicks on a cell in the UI or when the user clicks the Stop button. The status is retrieved from LocalStorage during the page initialization.

View

The view is implemented in a single HTML file (GameOfLife.html), using HTML5 markup and visual styles provided by Twitter Bootstrap. The grid is created dynamically at startup using Tempo.js HTML templating library out of a JSON object containing the grid structure. After that, all the changes to the status of the UI cells are made by the controller through jQuery (assigning css styles dynamically).

Tests

The classes Grid and Cell which implement the logic of the game were coded using test driven development with QUnit as unit testing framework.

There were implemented tests for creating the structure of the grid, it cells, and the relation between them, and also for the validation of known Game Of Life patterns (or lifeforms) such as Blinker, Block, Glider and Beacon.

Online Demo

Game Of Life demo
Unit tests & code linter

jsolarz/GameOfLife

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