A year or so ago I spent a few hours writing an IPv4 subnet calculator in javascript. I didn’t have any real goal, just a desire to play with javascript. I promptly forgot about it. Then a month or so ago I found it again and dusted it back off. I had a lot of fun rewriting it and then… forgot about it again.

After remembering it yet again last night, I decided enough was enough, filed the roughest edges off of it, and posted it:

Ippsy, The Experimental Javascript Application

There’s not a lot of use to the internet at large in this tool (no one needs yet another IP Calculator), but the core of this app is written such that other screens/functions/pages/tools can be added to it. At some point I’ll get a wild hair to add something new and this frame will be available to do it.

There are a couple of design rules that I think make this project interesting. The first is that I intend it to never grow beyond a single HTML page with Javascript and CSS embedded directly in it. This is not the greatest design choice for manageability, but my goal is that this tool is not a “website”, it’s an application that runs in a browser. By making it a single HTML page app distribution is as simple as “save as”.

The second design choice, which is really driven by the first, is that I won’t use any external frameworks. No jQuery, no ExtJS, etc. I want to build this in relatively pure HTML/Javascript/CSS, while still making the site as pretty as possible (which it is not right now, I admit).

One specific goal I have not set it legacy browser version support. There’s nothing in the tool right now that’s especially troublesome for older browsers, but I won’t much care if I introduce a problem in the future. The app is very specifically targeted at “the browser I am using right now”, and more loosely targeted at “the last version or two of the bigger browsers”.

There, I published it. Now I can forget about it again for another year and see if anyone finds it…