I bet that pretty much everyone who has used the internet for more than a year finds annoying the fact that he has to download some c++ or java program to run it, and the solution was given by most browsers by adding applets. Those don't seem to work in many cases, mainly for security reasons. My funny solution? Translate every relevant program to JS and put it online. This has so many great things to it: first of all it solves the problem of stuff not being online, but it also helps people learn about other languages, and will get people from other languages involved into JS learning. JS is also much faster to play with and debug, though it may not have the same performance as the native language. We will all learn something and maybe also have fun, while making the internet a bigger and better place

This only solves the first problem: having stuff on the internet. What about expanding the community, learning toghether and have fun? Tools often don't optimise other code to the potentials of JS, but you're (tecnically) not a tool: you can figure out creative solutions and enhancements to problems.

We'd be glad if you would! To do so, just look for an existing translating project and enhance it, or start your own project if you'd like to. You can then ask others to join or check out your project, or the whole initiative on facebook, or twitter or wherever you feel like you should!

Maybe not many know that Notch (minecraft creator) made a ludum dare entry (ld22), called minicraft. The game has pretty simple mechanics, about which you can find about on the wiki, but the game is currently only working on an old unstable version of java, and therefore unplayable. I was unable to find any working versions of the game, so decided that, since I have the possibility to look at the source through github, I was going to be the one translating the whole game to canvas and JS. The code written by Notch seems to me extremely clear, and translating it to js will only be a matter of re-writing it in a way that the browser can understand, without having to think about changing the whole logics, since JS supports everything Java does.

The first thing I would do is first translate everything and keep stuff as is, then make maybe another github repo with some enhancings to the code, without affecting the gameplay at all. After that, since it seems like Notch has completely abbandoned the project, I may extend it and add features and other things.

The point isn't only to make the game available to everyone again, but also to learn from it and have fun: I don't intend to use tools