Educational games are NOT dying. In fact, there are more now than there have ever been at any one time. How many sites on the Internet exist soley for the entertainment of children? 100's? Each of these sites has tons of games to play. Also, if you haven't gone to a computer store recently, you should. The last time I stopped in CompUSA to pick up an ink cartridge, there were more rows dedicated for educational games than for common games. I haven't played these games myself, but my neices and nephews seem to have no trouble finding about a million things to do on the computer oriented for children.
As correct as the author is regarding some of these game genres, he is really off on some others.
BTW - What a great speech by Adrian Brody.
Parsing a tree structure of any kind can sometimes be difficult because of the looping and recursion that is often required. I have written lots of code that has parsed XML structures with DOM parsers in Java. I don't think it is very difficult, but for the beginner it could be somewhat daunting.
Lately, I have been using XML schema and JAXB to greatly simplify my life. JAXB can take a schema (grammar) and create objects that represent the elements and attributes in an XML document. Once these objects are created, and this is pretty darn easy, the XML can be unmarshalled into the objects with a couple lines of code. Then, navigating the XML document is simply like travesing any other document object model. There are no tag names to remember! No run-time errors that are hard to track down. Plus, you can always run the newly created classes through JavaDoc to get the API for the classes that JAXB creates and passes to you.
Now I no longer write parsing code at all. My code space is more centered around the domain model instead of utilities. Try it, you might like it;)
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Educational games are NOT dying. In fact, there are more now than there have ever been at any one time. How many sites on the Internet exist soley for the entertainment of children? 100's? Each of these sites has tons of games to play. Also, if you haven't gone to a computer store recently, you should. The last time I stopped in CompUSA to pick up an ink cartridge, there were more rows dedicated for educational games than for common games. I haven't played these games myself, but my neices and nephews seem to have no trouble finding about a million things to do on the computer oriented for children.
As correct as the author is regarding some of these game genres, he is really off on some others.
BTW - What a great speech by Adrian Brody.
Lately, I have been using XML schema and JAXB to greatly simplify my life. JAXB can take a schema (grammar) and create objects that represent the elements and attributes in an XML document. Once these objects are created, and this is pretty darn easy, the XML can be unmarshalled into the objects with a couple lines of code. Then, navigating the XML document is simply like travesing any other document object model. There are no tag names to remember! No run-time errors that are hard to track down. Plus, you can always run the newly created classes through JavaDoc to get the API for the classes that JAXB creates and passes to you.
Now I no longer write parsing code at all. My code space is more centered around the domain model instead of utilities. Try it, you might like it ;)