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I am looking for a server technology that supports AMF (because I plan on using an as3/flash front end).

I would like to develop game logic / simulations that run on the server. Small number of users and logic at first, but that will grow.

I might use this for some simple turn based / simple tests, but I am hoping this will also support some tougher real time (RTS) or even MMO style games and simulations.

So far I have been looking at (in order of what I think is most promising so far):

WebORB - Looks the most promising so far, appears to be well supported and developed, lots of features, yet sells itself as easy. Looks like they have a community open source/free version

Cubeia Firebase - Looks really good, only thing that worries me is their statement that it does not work well for real time style games, but is ideal for turn-based. It might be ok for now, but what if I need to scale the game up? Open Source/Free

BlazeDS - Looks promising, supported by adobe, I should be able to develop game logic in the BlazeDS server and has amf support. Open Source/Free

Red5 - No release since 2010, some activity though. (has amf) Open Source/Free - however have not been able to locate any good 'game' examples / tutorials.

FlashMOG - looks interesting, but I am not sure if it is robust enough to act as an actual game server with continuously running logic. No release since 2010, Uses PHP as a socket server. Open Source/Free

RedDwarf (used to be SGS/Project Darkstar) -- no release since 2010, is this active? Has AS3 library, but it is out of date too? Open Source/Free

Cirrus, Wowza, FMS - these are more of a media server?

SmartFox, Electroserver - these are nice, but are not open source/free. I believe they have limited connection versions available and while I am hoping to scale my project above those limitations I do not expect to be drawing an income to pay for the licenses at that point

LCDS (live cycle data services) - similar to blazeDS, not free

Any other options or clarifications??

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Voting to close as a "Which technology should I use?" question. – Jonathan Hobbs Aug 22 '12 at 7:12

closed as not constructive by Jonathan Hobbs, Tetrad♦ Aug 23 '12 at 22:21

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2 Answers

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For business applications I used Spring with BlazeDS in combination. This is a very nice combination. You have all support for NoSQL, JDBC, JMX, full transaction control, authentication, integration frameworks like Apache Camel and much much more. I don't know all technologies you listed above. But here are my (fast) thoughts. You need to think about data synchronization, transactions and protocols.

With Red5 you are able to build your communication up on RTMP which is the bi-directional protocol which is very fast but this is more like a Web Server technology and not a framework. For RTMP you need opened ports but I think there are solutions to bring RTMP through HTTP.

With LCDS from Adobe which is in my opinion a wonderful technology is much too expensive (arround 30k per CPU). This would save you a lot of time thinking about data synchronization, messaging, data conflicts, lazy loading etc. and it also provides the very fast RTMP protocol. Clustering is also possible. With money this would be your first option.

BlazeDS gives you only the base to build on your own framework. A wonderful start from is ClearData Toolkit from Yakov Fain or one of it's nice books like this. He will explain the basics about data sync and how you can write your own sync mechanism for optimistic locking. BlazeDS gives you the ability to send messages out to clients. Clustering can be done by JGroups between the single nodes. Problem here is only the sharing of FlexSessions between the nodes (session replications). As protocol you only can use AMF over HTTP.

Don't use Cirrus aka FMS aka LCCS. This maybe will be stopped by Adobe and would be much too expensive too.

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up vote -6 down vote

FlashMOG. End of story.

http://flashmog.net/

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I don't think you get to say "End of story" here - you actually need to explain your answer since we cannot take your word for it. Even the most credible and reliable users here would have a hard time getting away with an answer like this. – Jonathan Hobbs Jun 23 '11 at 0:29
@Jonathan Hobbs - You're right. I hope no ones critical thinking shut down when I said "End of story". Don't take my word for it. Look around. I'm sure you won't find any PHP socket server as advanced as FlashMOG. @Scott Szretter - ZendAMF isn't a socket server, it's just an amf gateway; it writes an AMF serialized message and then lets you do what you want with it. But it isn't a daemon, and you'll have to work to get it working with your daemon. FlashMOG is intended to be run as a daemon. – cellis Jun 24 '11 at 17:01
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Ok, but do you get that to provide a good answer, it's your responsibility to actually say something about that? Imagine if ten people answered with ten systems and said nothing about it, and then every reader would have to spend ten hours researching them before they could make a decent decision - vs each person just spending five minutes elaborating on some of the factors that have you answer with that system. – Jonathan Hobbs Jun 25 '11 at 3:57
RedDwarf has yet to solve core problems with their scalability, and I've been following development for years. – Patrick Hughes Jul 7 '11 at 21:18
Cirrus works great without much hassle. You need to set up a webservice for exchanging peerIDs which is essential for cirrus to operate. Its free(atleast for now). Don't know if it can be used commercially now. – Astromaz3 Jul 10 '11 at 7:17

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