One day, I witnessed the usual trout slappings of IRC, perpetrated by the usual mIRC users. It was the usual thing:

* SomeLamer slaps Victim around a bit with a large trout

This sort of message is typically generated by mIRC's /SLAP command. It's an awfully trivial alias, intended primarily to teach users how to make aliases. Still, some people find it entertaining.

As I watched the water warriors fight it out, I thought to myself, Wouldn't it be cool if I one-upped these guys, and made the most sophisticated /SLAP ever? This program, Randtrout, is the distant descendant of my efforts to realize this goal.

The first version of Randtrout, 0.1, was written in C++ and was very primitive compared to the current version. I hacked on and improved it for a while, eventually raising its version number to 0.3.2. To give you an idea of the level of sophistication of this program:

• There were 261 lines of C++ code, including comments, as of version 0.3.2.
• It had its various lists hard-coded in, requiring a recompile in order to change them.
• The various lists were:
  • Fish (to be used as weapons).
  • Sizes of fish.
  • Powers -- that is, how much the victim was slapped, or with what force.
  • Attack types, used randomly, in replacement of the standard attack type. The standard attack type is:

    * Attacker slaps Victim around a bit with a large trout

    The non-standard attack types are something to the effect of:

    * Attacker was imprisoned for 30 days for aggravated assault of Victim with a large trout

    Or even:

    * Attacker decorates the opposite wall with blood and guts formerly belonging to Victim with a large trout

Though primitive compared to this version, Randtrout 2 was a radical step forward in Randtrout technology (forgive my choice of words here). Among its major highlights:

• Randtrout 2 was written in Java.
• The various phrase lists were no longer hard-coded; instead, they were stored in a configuration file, in the user's home directory.
• There were now five lists:

  Messages

  The overall trout slap message template.

  Actions

  Also known as verbs. Something like slaps or brutally pummels.

  Adjectives

  Actually adverbs; these described an action, such as around a bit or all over the place.

  Weapons

  The weapons to be used to carry out the attack -- trout being the traditional example.

  Weapon Sizes

  The sizes of the aforementioned weapons, e.g. large.

• Messages could reference any of the other elements, along with a few special things, like automatic articles, with printf-style % codes. %n was the code for an automatic article, for instance.

  In Randtrout 3, these sequences have been superseded by the XML tags in the configuration file.

• Using the GUI facilities of Java, called Swing, Randtrout 2 sported a graphical configuration tool. Though by no means easy to use, this tool was much more elegant than editing source files and recompiling.

• Messages, as defined above, could now be given a probability that they would be selected. This way, a certain message could be more rare than the others.

  In case you're wondering, the <member> element in the Randtrout 3 configuration file provides this functionality, through the chance attribute.

Some time after making Randtrout 2, I became dissatisfied with its inelegance and inflexibility, and so I stopped using it. Eventually, I decided that I should write another Randtrout, that would overcome Randtrout 2's limitations. Once I got to thinking about it, I quickly realized that the flat configuration format used by Randtrout 2 would have to go; references needed to be more flexible, and there needed to be more elements, which meant multiple-character elements, which meant the % code mechanism used by Randtrout 2 would have to be retired.

When I considered how to format the configuration file to allow for multiple-character elements, it became obvious that XML was probably a good choice. The JAXP API was the first thing I looked at for an XML processor, and, as you can probably tell, I was not overly impressed with the alternatives. I began to learn JAXP, and the rest is history...