A program is worth a thousand…?

For the last week or so I’ve been following the #JS1K competition. Short for “Javascript 1 kilobyte”, the competition is to see who can create a fully functioning javascript app in 1024 bytes or less.

Its hard to explain to the non geeks why this competition is impressive. Imagine trying to make a working bicycle, spending only 50p. Or building a house, but you are only allowed 27 bricks and a door. As a comparison, this little image on the right is 1000 bytes – but both the apps below have been made with the same amount of space!

Anyway, the results of the competition came out a couple of days ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that my favourite entry, “The Legend of the Bouncing Beholder” came first. I have placed it below, especially as I was intrigued to see if wordpress lets me embed javascript code:

[iframe http://allaboutchris.co.uk/js/bouncinggame.htm 800 170]

Just click on it and use the cursor keys to move the bouncing character. It’s not the world’s best game, but absolutely incredible work for such a tight coding challenge. You can read all about how Marijn Haverbeke made it on his blog.

There are lots of other entries on the site – you can browse a huge list of them, but I will leave you with my second favourite: a fully automated living ecosystem:

[iframe http://allaboutchris.co.uk/js/ecosystem.htm 600 430]

Watch it for a bit, and you will see the plants multiplying and growing, then being eaten by the worms and growing again. Check out the explanation and source code on the site.

PS. I eventually managed to include the code within iframes, using the excellent Iframe Embedder plugin. Using this you simply use the code [ifra me http://webaddress.com 200 800] which will put webaddress.com in an iframe with a width of 200px and a height of 800px. Thanks to the guys in the forums for that one!