Functional Koans, Ringo 0.6
technique
functional
ringo
Functional Koans by David Laing is a way of learning functional JavaScript through testing. Each koan has associated tests that fail, and your job is to correct the code to make them pass. The koans presents a fundamental concept which you must master to be able to fix the code.
The project is based on Ruby Koans by Jim Weirich, which made a fairly big impact amongst Ruby developers. The word Koan is used in reference to Zen Buddhism:
As part of the training of teachers, monks, and students, koan can refer to a story selected from sutras and historical records. They may consist of a perplexing element or a concise but critical word or phrase extracted from the story.
Ringo 0.6
Ringo 0.6 is out, which includes improvements to http server and client libraries, no more extending JavaScript objects (that code is now effectively namespaced), CommonJS unit testing, and bunch of other changes.
The RingoJS tutorial has “App Engine Deployment” listed in the table of contents, but the content hasn’t been written yet. Gabriel Munteanu took this example and extended it to work more like a fully-functional blog, and called it Ringopress. The project’s documentation explains how to configure and deploy App Engine. If you’re new to Ringo or App Engine, this might be a nice project to play around with.
If you haven’t yet looked into App Engine and JavaScript, AppengineJS is a JavaScript port of the Python SDK by George Moschovits.
