yarmiganosca / juegas_de_palabras Goto Github PK

Description:
word_games is a rails application that allows a user to enter and solve mad libs. The interface is simple, if crude, and guides the user through both creation and solution actions. In addition there is a reporting section (at /reports) that provides users with summary totals about frequency of parts-of-speech and how often specific words (or phrases) are used as fill-ins in the solutions to mad libs.

Features:
Mad Libs

Issues:
Looks ugly

Planned Improvements:
0) make prettier
1) greater integration of twitter bootstrap into the app's user interface
2) render the report sections as tag clouds (they are so ideally suited to that particular visual metaphor) using jQCloud (jqcloud-rails)
3) assertion tests to accompany any coffeescript functionality

Possible Future Improvements (read: Pipe Dreams)
1) side-by-side as-you-solve rendering of the completed mad lib
2) an optional solution mode (params[:with_google_images] url variable) in which the solver, instead of replacing each placeholder with the user-provided text, replaces it with the first image Google returns in response to the user-provided text
>=3) look at using MongoDB as the data backend (the data model here is inherently hierarchical, so the idea is worth exploring)

Potentially Interesting Design/Architecture Decisions:

MadLibSolutions: Having a separate solution class not only makes serialization of MadLib easier, but makes ActiveRecord handle multiple users (in some hypothetical future release) creating different solutions to the same MadLib instance.

Using Yaml for MadLibSolution.values: Using .to_yaml and YAML::load allowed storage of MadLib.fieldsd and their replacement strings (data that quacks like a Hash, to be (almost) stored as a hash.

Instructions:
1) git clone into fresh directory
2) make a fresh rvm in that directory (Ruby 1.9.2 or higher)
3) bundle install
4) rake db:create:all
5) rake db:migrate