thank you all for reading my question~
Before asking some (2~3) questions, I will briefly explain what I am trying to do. I am trying to build a turn based multiplayer (1 vs 1) game. I have a little knowledge of Swift/IOS development, mysql, html, and jsp. I am planning to learn php since many people say combination of mysql and php is good for ios back-end programming.
Here are actual questions:
Do I need to get a droplet from places like Digital Ocean and deploy my own server? Or is it possible to use web hosting such as bluehost for this purpose?
This is the part which I have no clue about... How do I actually develop a multiplayer game? I can guess that this has something to do with tcp/ip socket programming. My experience with tcp/ip programming did not require mysql or something similar if I remember it correctly. In that vein, what's the role of some database like mysql when it comes to developing a multiplayer game? Of course it becomes handy when saving scores and achievement; however, I do not know why it is required for finding a match and establishing a connection. Wouldn't a private server needed instead for receiving and sending sockets? Does this mean I have to lease a dedicated server and setup everything by myself?
It seems like there are more than three questions... sorry for asking too many questions. I am a noob programmer and needs many advice from experts!
Is is necessary for me to deploy a web application for handling all backend stuffs? By the way, I am trying to avoid having users make an account. As a result, if I have to manage each user, maybe keeping each user's unique phone id can help me distinguish each user?
I have looked into both Google's and Apple's free game match system... It is very tempting to use them, but my friends designed game match screen and separate ranking systems. As so, I need to come up with a way to solve this conundrum. Please help me!!! Thank you all for reading my question again and help a poor soul here...
Related
I want to develop a native application to ios.
I want to build an app that is a mix of Instagram and YouTube,generally.
I need to persist and get data to and from the database,store user data(images,videos,audio etc.), Allow user to edit his uploaded media ( images,videos,audio etc.).Also things such as drag and drop, GPS and image edition are added.
So far I think these are the most demanding features that app will contain.
I think about using swift for the front end, but I am still considering what language and database to go with to develop this application.
I though I should maybe go with php laravel framework RESTful api(since I know it already), combined with firebase.
Any better suggestion you might think about, and why?
Will appreciate your honest thoughts about this.
I was really putting the last hours in order to determine the right language for developing the back-end and the database. And I reckon that really node.js and mongoDB , along with Swift will make the perfect match!
node.js seems to be good for my app, as it does not really require very complex computing, and MongoDB is ideal for social networking features. These are the main reasons I am going with this stack :)
Also,about scalability, it's easier in MongoDB,rather than MySQL.
I am an novice programmer and I need a little direction.
Here is the concept of what I am looking to do:
Let's say I have an iOS and or OS X app for let's say storing people's names and phone numbers. Now I want to be able to have multiple people to be able to use the same app on different devices and access the same database; read and write values at the same time.
I am moderately well versed with Core Data and I have found that it works well but is not capable of accomplishing what I am trying to do.
Could someone point me in the right direction to find resources where I could learn how to do this? Thanks.
I apologize if the question has been asked before; I tried to do searches but I didn't know exactly what to search/could not find what I was looking for.
It seems that what you want to achieve will require an external database storage, which would provide an API that both your iOS and Mac OS apps will use in order to read/write to this common database.
There are plenty of resources on how to setup a database and an API. A pretty simple (yet heavy) approach would be to create a little web server in the language of your choice (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Node...) that exposes a hosted database, and communicate with that API from your apps. My advice if you are a beginner, would be to have a look at RoR to setup a simple web server/Restful API that exposes a MySQL database: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html.
If this is not the answer you're looking for, maybe you want to use iCloud in order to keep your data in sync between devices. However, this is not applicable in a multi-user land (e.g. this will work fine for multiple devices of the same user).
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm planning the basic architecture for a new software that will need to be modular.
I'm trying to define a multitenancy application to have a single instance running for all the users.
What I need is the possibility to scale when and where needed, so I don't like the idea to spawn multiple applications (monolitical architectured) behind a load balancer when it could be a single part of the computation that needs more resources.
So I'm thinking about a Service Oriented Architecture, it would have the rails application as web client and other services, that could be virtually written in any language and accessed via APIs by the rails application.
I'd also like to have this APIs open to users to integrate with their existing software and easily extend these services.
I've some specific question:
would it be a good idea to have this kind of architecture for a new startup (1-5 employees)?
using APIs i don't need to use any RPC since the API request itself is an RPC, am I right on this concept?
what would be a nice standard for the APIs (REST only defines HOW to access resources)?
what could be, pratically, the best (= a good) way to expose those APIs to customers? Via the Web Rails application? Directly via a proxy that makes them all available under the same domain? APIs would be accessible in a RESTful way so via HTTP requests.
with this kind of architecture would it be less expensive to have VPS's, Cloud, or dedicated servers? I like clouds because of their failure-tollerant nature, it would free us from worry about data persistence and backups (including the fact that we want to build an architecture almost 100% available).
Any other suggestion or point of view, and any simply start point to think about this would be very appreciated.
I know very well Python, C/C++, JS, Perl, other pl and I started recently with Ruby/Rails. I'm choosing this last one because it seems to me that this community is strongly oriented in building services and what I mind (before that extreme performances) is the ability to learn asap and have someone to share experience with and to learn from, also with pratical examples (I know it's about an architecture, not PL that implements it, but I think it would be more easy to get it wrong in an immature environment that is still working with web1 or web2.0 style in mind).
P.S. I also need to write the basic architecture design, do you have any template where I can start from? I do need to share it with my team and other very-expert pros, I'd like to have it complete and easy to understand.
Hope to read some good suggestions here guys!
Thanks,
Alex.
Architecture
Here is an example stack that would I think mostly do what you're looking to accomplish:
Cluster
One or more app servers
One or more database servers
Zero or more job servers
Instances
Chef for configuration
Unicorn or Passenger
Nginx
Application
Ruby on Rails
Check out Grape for simple APIs
More Specific Answers
would it be a good idea to have this kind of architecture for a new startup (1-5 employees)?
If done correctly, this approach can be very stable and robust. What you don't want to do it get into a situation where you are spending all your time managing your servers. You want to get it up, be able to deal with problem instances quickly, and work on making your application do stuff. If you do it right, creating instances can be simple and totally automated.
using APIs i don't need to use any RPC since the API request itself is an RPC, am I right on this concept?
Yes.
what would be a nice standard for the APIs (REST only defines HOW to access resources)?
Here we'd need a bit more clarification on how you need to use RESTful design to accomplish specific goals.
what could be, pratically, the best (= a good) way to expose those APIs to customers? Via the Web Rails application? Directly via a proxy that makes them all available under the same domain? APIs would be accessible in a RESTful way so via HTTP requests.
A domain (or subdomain) should be accessible via HTTP and RESTful software design. It might return JSON or something else. It's all up to you.
with this kind of architecture would it be less expensive to have VPS's, Cloud, or dedicated servers? I like clouds because of their failure-tollerant nature, it would free us from worry about data persistence and backups (including the fact that we want to build an architecture almost 100% available).
You get what you pay for. I'd recommend cloud servers. Check out Heroku to get started, or Rackspace if you are prepared to "roll your own." Or Engine Yard.
Any other suggestion or point of view, and any simply start point to think about this would be very appreciated.
I would try creating a test API using something like a free Heroku account.
I am going to design a website using ruby on rails. And one of the features i want to implement is the chat functionality. Where users can chat with the other users/members of the website. What i should be using or in other words start learning in order to design something like that ?
Is XMPP the answer. if so, i would be glad if someone could be a bit descriptive on where to go from there and/or suggest some books. thanks !
I said XMPP because i know Facebook uses that and i plan to create something similar
Protocols can become a pretty hairy topic, implementing a well-working protocol yourself can be pretty daunting without prior experience. Especially if it has to do with (near) real-time communication between several parties. If this is supposed to scale to any significant number of visitors, implementing this correctly can be pretty tough.
XMPP is a protocol that is already well established, is shaken down and already has many stable implementations. So when using it, you do not need to worry about designing or implementing the protocol anymore. For that reason, I'd really recommend it. It's also a rather easy to understand protocol, even if you will have to spend some time reading up on the basics in the beginning. Look neigh further than http://xmpp.org for documentation.
Setting up an XMPP server can be done in minutes, depending on your OS and the server you choose. The caveat is that if you want to customize the server at all, you will have to learn about the innards of it as well to some degree, which may or may not take some time.
The bottom line is: choosing XMPP and existing XMPP libraries and servers, you get 90% of the functionality for free and can concentrate on implementing your client. The question is, how much will you have to dig into the details of XMPP and the server, will this take longer than rolling your own protocol and will your own protocol suit your needs in the long term as well as XMPP would?
You always have to think about how much you want to spend on implementing this.
If you go with XMPP you will be able to run a XMPP standard chat server (outside of Rails) and should be able to use a JavaScript Client with a XMPP to HTTP Bridge.
A project a quick Google Search brought up doing this is Strophe.
But I'd argue that you should think long and hard about if XMPP really suits your needs and if you really want to go through all that trouble for a Chat.
Implementing your own is also not straightforward, especially when you are writing all the long-polling and signaling stuff yourself.
But it's not impossible and should give you a simple working solution in a couple of days.
Doing the chat yourself in Rails will require you however to use an alternative Database since Rails can't store data in-memory between requests and persisting chat data in ActiveRecord seems like not a very scalable and good idea.
Using XMPP obviously has the benefit of your users being able to connect to your Chat service using iChat, Jabber or any other XMPP Client..
I'm trying to write a scalable interactive chat application for an existing high traffic website. It needs to be scalable on day 1, and chat's concurrency and multi-broadcast issues make it a tricky thing to scale.
My initial plan was to write the whole thing in rails and refactor the chat server into erlang later.
Although I am an experienced PHP dev and sysadmin, both node.js and RoR are new and extremely alien technologies to me, so I could use a little help understanding the core concepts and applications in this scenario. With so many new technologies, it is hard to understand them all.
Firstly, I recommend you review http://ajaxim.com/. The software is a pre-packaged version of what you want that relies on Node JS (far easier than rolling your own).
If you still want to write something yourself and have no experience with either technology, I recommend you review some introductory materials:
Node JS and Rails
The two sources are not free but will give you a quick one hour crash course on each technology.
You can also have a look at http://pusherapp.com ! This is if you want to implement a chat app right away.
If on the other hand, you want to implement one all by yourself, Node.js + Socket.io is your best bet. However, if you want chat rooms and stuff, have a look at this:
http://github.com/shripadk/express-juggernaut-demo
This demo app uses Express.JS framework and Juggernaut 2.
I would suggest going for only Node.js if you are building apps that require high concurrency. Its fairly easy to implement a chat room using Node.js compared to other server-side languages (mainly thanks to modules like socket.io). The event-driven architecture of Node.js makes it really easy to implement such stuff. The only catch with Node is that you have to think everything asynchronous! If you are good at Javascript then Node.js should be easy to learn.