Significant developer changes to Blockly Games

[Neil Fraser]

If you are a user of Blockly Games, nothing has changed and you can ignore this message.

If you are a developer of Blockly Games, a lot has changed.  The central issue is that Closure Templates (the *.soy files) is no longer being used by Blockly Games.  This forced a rewrite of the message system, the internationalization system, the HTML templating system, and the build system.  Thus a lot of files have moved around.

One important change is that the build system is now somewhat faster.  Instead of taking several hours to do a full compile, it now takes less than two minutes.  The updated build commands are listed here:

https://github.com/google/blockly-games/wiki/Build

As of this moment, the version of Blockly Games currently being served in production at https://blockly.games is still the old version, but this will be updated over the weekend once testing is complete.

So, what happened?  Well, although our build script was pulling down the 'latest' version of Closure Templates, it turns out that their development team quietly stopped publishing updates to that location in 2014.  This led to a remarkably stable dependency over the years.  Right up until a new version of Java landed which could no longer execute this old code.  The work required to upgrade to today's version of Closure Templates was deemed to be greater than just replacing that entire system with our own code.

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Neil Fraser
https://neil.fraser.name