Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

This article may not be chronocally correct. It’s such a long time ago..

Well, it stinked.(after I revived it at least, the original by alienator rocked.)

Because I wasn’t satisfied with it, I started making plans for a bigger, better udc. Inspired by customize.org, an interactive skinning site, I started learning perl. But quite frankly, I stinked at it. I tried to code a news comments system for the revived udc(I had bigger plans, but perl was so..hard.), but I could not get it to work. After around a month of messing with simple scripts, and buying two perl books, I dumped perl.

Around that time, jazz2city died I believe.. I again revived udc. Still without scripts. Still stinky.

UDC then kinda died out..I still had ideas for it, but I could not implement them.
wow..this article sounds so braggy somehow, and I doubt this is interesting. :))

A lot of time later, I was playing in the jj2 anniversary after-bash, and JJF joined the server. For some reason, I was just talking about my vanished plans with Udc. He joined the conversation and told me how he also had ideas like that.(He even already had interviewed most of the JJ2 staff.) He promised to e-mail me. And he had the design ready in no time. We still use that design. It’s very cool imho. :P

A conversation with a time-span of 24 hours between messages(because of our timezones) followed. We had agreed on how to do it. We were going to code a site called Jazz2Online(that was the name of jjf’s new jj2 site.)in ASP.

ASP is an abbreviation of Active Server Pages. I got into it via Visual Basic(evil!). It was easy, there were lots of good sites for it, but no hosting. I searched for good free hosts everywhere.. We decided to ask onag. But his communitech server didn’t have asp. So we had to look somewhere else. I was browsing Webmonkey, and accidently came across php(which is very alike perl).

Php stands for php hypertext preprocessor(It’s a recursive acronym.)

It’s an opensource language that runs on Apache, a opensource unix/linux/windows server. It is good in working together with mysql, a database server. I did some quick searching, and came across some tutorial pages. At the same time, cheeze was hacking into newspro(a perl-based news system) to try to create a automatic uploader for levels on jazz 2 warehouse. He was also very annoyed with perl. I asked him if he perhaps was interested in learning php with me and helping with j2o.

Well, cheeze turned out to be a very good addition to j2o. :)

We started learning php with the use of the official manual at php.net. It was short, but very well written for us newbies. We also got some php/mysql tutorials from various sites. As we were coding scripts(I was working on the news/comments system, and cheeze on the whole user database stuffness and later the private messages system), we showed bobby a lot of it. Bobby had joined jdc a while back, and got the idea to recode jdc with php. He also wanted to help a bit with j2o. Well, he did more then that. He provided us with support, and he also programmed the poll.(more about that later).

The whole coding process took around 3 months I think..or even longer.

And then..UJ died. I was talking in AIM to alienator, about UJ and J2o, and he was kinda angered by the load on his shoulders, that UJ was. He had to review all levels and do most of the updating himself, and that was a lot of work. He decided to drop UJ, he immediatly deleted the whole thing. The community was now without a good website.

We went on highspeed with j2o. There was still quite alot to be done. And I had to go on vacation in one week. We worked our brain’s off to get the thing done, and we got it done. The poll was the hardest thing. Bobby and I couldn’t get the thing to work. So bobby recoded the whole thing in mysql in one day. That night j2o went online.

The rest is readable in the news. :)