About
My Test Bench is a showcase for web experimentation. We mostly develop in private labs, but every once
in a while, something worthy emerges and will be promoted to this site. The purpose is to maintain a portfolio
of our work, provide samples for others to learn from, and also generate new ideas for future experiments.
Our Work
RSS
MyHeadlines - MyHeadlines is an RSS aggregator with
Full Text search capabilities. The emergent behaviour is an efficient Current Events Search
Engine. There's screen scraping technology for building custom feeds, and for harvesting
Stock Ticker data. Blogging, Link Dump, and Comments are features included in the
standard download. If you have a PHP and MySQL based web architecture then MyHeadlines is the
Content Syndication Engine for You!
JavaScript
JavaScript Sudoku - Sudoku presents a great problem;
its very basic rules result in intricate logic required to solve a board. But where the logic fails,
often a guess is required. It is at this moment that Sudoku becomes a very effective vehicle for
learning a new programming language. Here you will find our first
JavaScript Sudoku, an experiment with JavaScript and CSS.
JavaScript Add-A-Gram - Following our Sudoku success we
found one aspect of JavaScript particularly disturbing: Browser Timeouts. Most browsers monitor the
running JavaScript to ensure that poor scripting doesn't lock-up the browser session. In most cases
this is a very good thing to do. But, for us, we found it quite annoying. Our JavaScript computing
activities were somewhat academic and arguably inappropriate: doing heavy computations client side
was an unexpected repurposing of the platform. Did we give up? No. Instead we set out to find a
problem that was orders of magnitude more complicated, and then build the technology to solve it
without triggering a Browser Timeout. JavaScript Add-A-Gram
will successfully solve itself, taking about an hour to do so, and not once trigger a browser warning.
Mobile Java Applications
Your favorite Dot Eating Pie Chart was used to explore UI
control and animation technology on modern handheld Java devices. We explore the basic game loop and push
this low power platform to its frame rate limits. The result is a surprisingly addictive casual gaming experience.
Contact
We can be reached through our Contact Page.