Inside Technique : Using the Explorer Solitaire library
By Rajeev Hariharan

A couple of weeks ago, we presented Explorer Solitaire, a JScript library that enables you to create your own Solitaire games, and also some demo games written using this library. In this article we will take a look at how you can take advantage of the powerful functionality provided by this library to write card games of your own, with little or no coding. Rather than provide something so uncool as a programmer's reference to the library, we decided to walk you through a possible real-life application, an implementation of a practice area for an on-line gambling salon.

OneBornEveryMinute.com has commissioned you to develop an on-line practice version of Canfield, a popular card gambling game available from their site. Their problem is that few surfers are willing to download the 3 MB plus software required to play the game. As Marketing Strategist Harry Conner explains to you, 'We gotta hook the suck... uh, customers, before we can get 'em to download the beast'. What he wants is a lightweight fast-loading practice game that does not require any download. And he doesn't mind an IE-only implementation, provided you can get it out yesterday.

On this happy note, you power up your favourite editor and move to the directory where you have downloaded the Explorer Solitaire library from SiteExperts' Internet Playground. Being extremely methodical , like all professional Web developers :-), you note the sequence of steps you must follow -

• Understand the rules of the game.
• Prepare the data file for Canfield.
• Write the Canfield web page.
• Overload Jscript functions in the library to define a custom interface for the game.

The first thing you do is read the rules of the game, and then, (since you're on Company time anyway), play Canfield on-line.

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