I spent a few hours today hacking the Java solitaire thingee, I'm close to a landmark. Which would be a human playable GUI the can store my games to disk.

Some of its internals are a wee bit iffy, the look/GUI is awful and I really do need to revisit the unit tests. Still I'm pleased on the whole.

Mostly what I'm pleased about, is that, for once, I did something well—I'd planned an Observer pattern, but plans and fulfillment are often strangers to one another. But when I plumbed the thing together today it worked [almost] seamlessly. What was particularly pleasing was that I could insert Objects [almost everywhere] and it still, just, worked. I'd meant this to happen, but such outcomes do not always occur in my experience.

I'm tempted to crash-on. That would be a wrong thing. In a couple of places my Objects didn't perform in the way that I'd expected them to, despite the tests that I'd written. As Phil W says, the first step is to, "write a failing test". I don't have much trouble writing failing tests, but I know what he really means—if you can write the test you can write the code; and you should write  the test before you write the code.

Anyway tomorrow I write the I/O. I think that I'm going to go for string [UTF-8] and XML. And possibly HTML. I won't be serializing any Objects any-time soon methinks.