ZUMAjs

Link
http://www.swietochlowice.org/%7Emierzwm/zuma/index.html


The reason

This time I wanted to take a challenge of making more dynamic game in javascript.. The choice was Zuma. Zuma is a very nice and absorbing game. It is good to relax and free your mind when it is overcrowded by thoughts.

So there is my solution: ZumaJS

And you can also checkout others made in Flash:

http://game.zylom.com/servlet/Entry?g=3013&s=2576&nocache=1253559336508
http://www.gry.pl/gra/Honey_Trouble.html

Technical info
 Thread-like behavior.
Although js does not provide multithreading you can fake it behavior by spawning comparatively short pieces of code in intervals. It does not take advantage of 4-core processor though (unless you use Google gears and task workers). So instead of putting all in main big loop I have decided to give "free will" to every object. It means that every orb and cannon are separated objects which decide of themselves and know only their neighbours. Every object runs in a separated "faked thread".

How to rotate:
For rotating a canon I decided that the most comfortable way would be to use canvas. Of course, there is snag - IE does not support canvas but there comes salvation called excanvas

What's more?
Paths are composed of Bezier Curves and all this stuff is created using great mootools framework. It is lightweight, it is powerful and it provides way of coding which js ought to support natively.

Sum up
I am afraid that javascript manipulation on DOM is slow and it can be difficult to develop more complex games.Moreover, it seems that the best way to deal with sound in javascript is to use Flash wrapper... Still javascript and web technologies is more and more popular so it will definitely  improve its lacks. Due to fact that development time is very easy and quick it will spread to be not only browser (and second important server side) language, but also to provide stand alone applications like Adobe AIR (and Google seems to head in the same direction).