Couple of month ago I have finished the JavaScript Crossword puzzle engine. It is a complete JavaScript application generator that takes a list of words and their definitions and spits out a working JavaScript crossword. You can see how the engine works by playing with Gang Of Four Software Design Patterns Crossword for example.

The JavaScript crossword engine is a closed-source at the moment. I was planning to collaborate with some folks from the Ontario Private School system as we did on the Google maps JavaScript framework for the Ontario Private and the Public schools. The project did not go forward as planned and I now plan to license, sell, or donate the JavaScript crossword engine to good folks for a good cause. Please drop me a line if you are one of those.

The JavaScript crossword engine was an attempt to create an interactive competitive educational product for a school. The children of various ages (and native languages) could solve the crossword and other puzzles while being in the class in the real-time. They could even compete with each other by solving one large puzzle collaboratively, while keeping the individual scores. The crossword competition concept is very cool! I might tell you a bit about this in some future posts.

Another application was considered in the creative advertising. One can create a crossword that, instead of the textual questions, shows the product pictures and asks the player to spell out the product names. You can see how we use the colored boxes instead of images in the Basic Colors Crossword . Check out Big Names in Fashion Are Puzzled Again types of questions that one might put together trying to appeal to the female audience.

The technology of choice is JavaScript. I continue to invest in the design and the architecture of the JavaScript applications. It seems to me that a lot of leverage can be gained in development of e-commerce and web applications by finding and reusing the proper abstractions in the user interface alone. The development cost of web apps can be reduced and the quality can be improved - dramatically!

On this path, the JavaScript allows me to practice the XML DOM GUI programming, without the need to actually deploy Microsoft XAML or Adobe Flex & MXML. I like the XML DOM for GUI development, which is the basis for JavaScript crossword engine described here. I think this new programming model might work very well, especially for the web apps. You can use it now, not waiting for the XAML or MXML or whatever, with the plain JavaScript and the HTML DOM, both of which have 100% browser market penetration.

The effective use of CSS was another area to practice in this project. Being in HTML and JavaScript since 1994, I used to leave CSS to the designers to worry about. Now I try to design the general approach to using CSS and the application skinning as a part of overall design of JavaScript application. As a result, the crosswords are styled exclusively with CSS and fully support skinning. I still have a little bit of work to do on using Attribute Acquisition in CSS to its fullest.

The words weaving turned out to be a very hard algorithmic problem and I am very happy that it is all solved now. I did not find any good recent open-source implementations, only an ancient one in C. I hope to see new crossword words weaving interview questions to replace the string reversal.