Re: Libre web front-end

[Paul Fernhout]

Hi Mary-Anne,

There are so many options for web front ends that your question has no 
easy answer. And many (but not all) web UI libraries these days have 
free licenses (often MIT or BSD) so there are a lot of possible choices. 
If you ask a dozen different web developers you may get a dozen 
different answers for preferred libraries or frameworks or tools. 
Related satire:
https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f

I personally prefer Mithril+Tachyons (both MIT licensed) for web UI 
development for technical reasons explained at the following link -- and 
also because Mithril is supported by a few well-meaning individuals who 
use it themselves and not a big privacy-invading corporation like 
Facebook (React) or Google (Angular):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril

But in my day job I usually still get stuck using Angular and React as 
they are more popular -- in part from being pushed by big companies.

Here is an example of a (AGPL'd) Interactive Fiction authoring tool and 
player I ported to the web from Delphi in my spare time using Mithril:
https://storyharp.com/v3.0/

But Mithril is oriented more towards general UIs and not specifically 
games. So, you might want a more game-specific library for JavaScript 
depending on what you wanted to develop. Here is one starting place for 
JavaScript game libraries, but no doubt you could find more each with 
various pros and cons:
"Top 15: Best open source [sorry] javascript game engines"
https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/308/top-15-best-open-source-javascript-game-engines

Or if you were willing to consider learning other languages than 
JavaScript, here are some game libraries  and related articles for Elm 
-- which is a great functional web UI language that compiles to 
JavaScript, and itself is under the Revised BSD license, and might be 
more fun to learn and use than JavaScript:
https://github.com/rofrol/awesome-elm-gamedev

In the end though you'll just have to do due diligence of evaluating the 
licenses of whatever you choose from so many options -- including making 
sure they are compatible with however you want to license your project 
(e.g. GPL perhaps). For example, in the past for a GPl'd project, I 
considered using the otherwise awesome Clojure language and 
ClojureScript (which can create web apps) and the related ecosystem of 
libraries, but unfortunately the language is under the Eclipse Public 
License 1.0 which is not GPL-compatible and some libraries for Clojure 
also unfortunately tend to choose the same license which prevent their 
inclusion in a GPL'd application.

Issues about privacy and such usually have mostly to do with how and 
where you setup the server to host the content and what the server 
records related to access and use -- so they are not so much about the 
front end UI library. Much of that has to do with how you configure 
logging for whatever server software you use. But whatever choices you 
make, at a minimum a user's ISP and the server's web hosting service 
will know the IP addresses involved.

As with UI front ends, there are so many options for server software and 
hosts. But perhaps you might consider making a project on GNU Savannah 
and hosting it there (using whatever front end libraries you choose)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/

Good luck with your game.

--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

On 2019-11-09 14:08, MARY-ANNE WOLF wrote:
> If I wanted to write a game that people could play in their browser.
>    and I wanted people who were concerned about libre software and 
> their
>    privacy to be able to play, what technology could I use?