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Dictionary Aide - v0.2
Nov. 10th, 2012 12:49 pmSometimes I surprise myself with how quickly I can put together a small program.
Case in point: Yesterday I was playing an online Scrabble-like game called Popotamo, and had been using an online word-search tool to find the highest-scoring options (the longest words, in this case), but kept running into problems when the board got pretty full.
So I decided to grab a copy of the SOWPODS dictionary (the dictionary used by the game I've been playing) and try to write a simple program to provide suggestions based on the tiles I had already, as well as providing an option for specifying constraints for the words.
As it turns out, it was actually a rather simple program to write, taking less than four hours to complete, most of which was spent trying to figure out how to design the User Interface.
Originally, I'd written it in Python, an easy-to-use scripting language, but realized that it's not a very fast language, nor is it terribly portable.
So I decided to rewrite it in Java, which took less than two hours, most of which was spent trying to remember how Java does GUIs...
However, the advantages Java has over Python were threefold: First, it was fast, which is great when processing long lists of words. Second, it is entirely platform-independent, which means that it can run on any type of computer that has a Java implementation. Third, the program can be packaged up into a single file, which means that you don't have to fiddle around with the dictionary file, because it's wrapped up in the single file.
(also, if I so chose, I could embed it in a web page, but I've decided against that for the moment)
Anyway, I was quite surprised at how fast it came together, and once I've found an appropriate place to host the file, I'll be posting a link here so others can use it too.
Case in point: Yesterday I was playing an online Scrabble-like game called Popotamo, and had been using an online word-search tool to find the highest-scoring options (the longest words, in this case), but kept running into problems when the board got pretty full.
So I decided to grab a copy of the SOWPODS dictionary (the dictionary used by the game I've been playing) and try to write a simple program to provide suggestions based on the tiles I had already, as well as providing an option for specifying constraints for the words.
As it turns out, it was actually a rather simple program to write, taking less than four hours to complete, most of which was spent trying to figure out how to design the User Interface.
Originally, I'd written it in Python, an easy-to-use scripting language, but realized that it's not a very fast language, nor is it terribly portable.
So I decided to rewrite it in Java, which took less than two hours, most of which was spent trying to remember how Java does GUIs...
However, the advantages Java has over Python were threefold: First, it was fast, which is great when processing long lists of words. Second, it is entirely platform-independent, which means that it can run on any type of computer that has a Java implementation. Third, the program can be packaged up into a single file, which means that you don't have to fiddle around with the dictionary file, because it's wrapped up in the single file.
(also, if I so chose, I could embed it in a web page, but I've decided against that for the moment)
Anyway, I was quite surprised at how fast it came together, and once I've found an appropriate place to host the file, I'll be posting a link here so others can use it too.
