Game server for an android/iOS turn-based board-game

Question

I am currently programming an iPhone game and I would like to create an online multiplayer mode. In the future, this app will be port to Android devices, so I was wondering how to create the game-server?

First at all, which language should I choose? How to make a server able to communicate both with programs written in objective-c and Java?

Then, how to effectively do it? Is it good if I open a socket by client (there'll be 2)? What kind of information should I send to the server? to the clients?

Answer 1

I don't mean to start a holy war here, but most of the internet services (flickr, twitter, facebook and such) have been dropping SOAP in favor of RESTful webservices and JSON as the serialized format. Although essentially the same, REST services rely on the url and http method to define what should be done, for example

GET /articles - list all articles
POST /articles - add a new article
PUT /articles/123 - update article 123 with new data

JSON - described in json.org - is also simpler than XML, and altough maybe irrelevant, will save you a few bytes per request. Following the previous example, here's how an article would be described in JSON notation:

{ 
 "id": 123,
 "author": "Cyril",
 "content": "Hello, this is an article",
 "tags": [ "gamedev", "webservices", "multiplayer" ] 
}

For the IOS there's this nice article http://petermcintyre.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/consume-json-rest-in-ios/ which mentions http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/ for parsing and generating the data.

Being turn-based, you can rely on http sessions on the server to maintain state, so there's no need to keep a persistent socket connection to the server. Any server-side language supports this (php, python, java, etc).

This architecture allows you to scale horizontally (adding more servers) in a transparent way.

Answer 2

Since your game is going to be turn based, real-time updates are not super important. The easiest way to do this is to use an already built server, I would go with a web server. Any platform worth porting your game to should facilitate accessing web services located on a web server.

In order to provide updates in near real-time, I recommend you look into long polling. The code at that link, provides the most basic implementation of long polling from the server side. But the bottom line is that once a request is made to a resource, the server executes a blocking call until the data requested becomes available. Then you repeat the process again, and again.

In terms of what data should you send back, always treat the client as hostile. The client should send whatever its "turn-state" is, the server validates it, and then if everything checks out, it sends the new "game-state" back to all connected clients.

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SOAP web services is probably the best place to start (link), they are easy to get started, and most web frameworks provide a method for exposing them. You might also want to look into RESTful services, but they typically leave a bit more of the serialization process up to the consumer.

For consuming SOAP web services on Android, I'd look here.

Answer 3

I think using SOAP or even HTTP is overkill. Just define your own protocol over vanilla TCP-connections. For example, interpret each line of text sent as a command. Define what commands/responses the client and the server is allowed to send.

FICS works that way and it has been serving thousands of chess players for many years. IRC works that way too (see RFC 1459).