8.7. Suggested Exercises

A game is perhaps the best kind of project for a book like this because there are literally limitless suggestions that could be made. I'll leave you with just a few:

• Use your well-practiced Gears database knowledge and allow for saving of high scores. Er, you'll have to implement high scores first of course! Maybe it's just the fastest winners or something like that, it's up to you!

• If you're really feeling daring, and you have some server-side coding chops, how about adding the ability to play against someone remotely? That's clearly a much bigger project, but it would let you play around with Ext JS's Ajax capabilities, something that was only briefly described in this book (on purpose, since this is a book focused on client-side development).

• Here's a relatively simple one: store the card deck and page background choices so that it gets set that way the next time the game is played. You could store this info in cookies, or you could go hog-wild and stash it in a Gears database.

• One flaw in this application is that if you resize the browser, nothing on the page repositions itself. I left that out on purpose because that would be a good exercise for you to do. My suggestion is to have a Viewport that takes up the whole page and hook into its resizing event, but the approach is up to you!