The generators are the most important things on Friendship-Bracelets.net. Users use them to make their own pattern, either of type Normal, Alpha, Kumihimo or simple name patterns.
There has been a lot of problems with the generators since the site started. The first normal generator was written in pure PHP, and the users had to interact with it by writing “pattern code”. This code looked somewhat like this:
DDDD
ddd
RRRR
rrrEach letter in this code was representing a knot, and each row represented a row in the pattern. D meant “forward knot”, d was backward knot, R backward-forward knot, and r forward-backward knot. Can you imagine writing a pattern this way?
Another drawback with a PHP generator was that the server had to do all the rendering and send back the results to the user every time he/she updated the code. This was very heavy for the server.
Later on, I made the generator in Flash. I really hated Flash (I still do) but it was the only reasonable way to make an interactive generator at that time.
By that time the site had the same generator code written in both Flash and PHP, which doubled the code maintenance time for me. And I had no experience in unit testing, which made everything a whole mess.
Now everything is going to be written in JavaScript, and all the code is going to be unit tested. I’m really excited that the site finally is getting simpler to maintain.