Every couple of months, we have a Research Week. It's kind of like the well-known Google 20% time but instead of doing it one day a week, we gather up our time and do a week of maps-based hacking. It's totally cross-discipline so we usually gather a couple of developers, a couple of UX and visual designers, a QA and build something cool. In past Research Weeks, I've built or helped build the Alien Easter Egg, Maps Labs and CoverMap.Me. I also built a maps-based JSBin fork called JotApp.
When my partner-in-crime Max started working on the latest version of his jQuery plugin (formerly called jOvi, now called jHERE), I wanted to build a new playground where people could play and build their own maps mashups and hacks really easily. My first thought was to rework the fork of JSBin again and maybe add in a slightly nicer default theme. I wanted users to be able to save to Gists so, seeing as there is already an SQLite and a MySQL adapter, I wrote a Gist adapter which appeared to the application as if it were a database but actually saved to anonymous Gists. The problem was that it was a bit too… heavy.
Don't get me wrong, JSBin is a fantastic project. It just does a lot more than I needed. I didn't need the MySQL adapter, the alternate themes, the localstorage or the user registration. Also, it's a bit too weighty for my phone. When someone tweets a link to a JSBin or a JSFiddle, I usually check it out on my phone and it's not the best experience. Seeing as HERE maps work on mobile, I wanted my playground to work, too. Rather than spend a couple of hours cutting out all the bits I didn't want from JSBin, I decided to spend a couple of hours building my own version from scratch. So, this past Sunday afternoon, that's exactly what I did:
It's written in NodeJS on top of express and works nicely on desktop, iPad and mobile.
The project is open-sourced on GitHub (naturally) and can be modified to be a general JS-playground for anything. If you fancy a simple, self-hosted JS hackspace, just change the default HTML, CSS and JS and it's ready to go.
