Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

5.2. Maintaining State in Hidden Fields

Figure 5.1 shows the main example used in this chapter, an online hangman game. When the user first accesses the program, it chooses a random word from a dictionary of words and displays a series of underscores for each of the word's letters. The game prompts the user to type in a single letter guess or, if he thinks he knows it, the whole word. Each time the user presses return (or the "Guess" button), the game adds the guess to the list of letters already guessed and updates the display. Each time the user makes a wrong guess, the program updates the image to show a little bit more of the stick figure, up to six wrong guesses total. When the game is over, the user is prompted to start a new game. A status area at the top of the screen keeps track of the number of words the user has tried, the number of games he's won, and the current and overall averages (number of letters guessed per session).^[2]

^[2] Lincoln was very gratified when he tested the first working version of the game on his wife. She took over the computer and refused to give it back for hours!

This hangman game is a classic case of a web application that needs to maintain state across an extended period of time. It has to keep track of several pieces of information, including the unknown word, the letters that the user has already guessed, the number of wins, and a running average of guesses. In this section, we implement the game using hidden fields to record the persistent ...