Hi everyone,
since this is my first post, i wanted to say "Hi!" to everyone reading these forums and thank you to everyone who is participating in the discussions. Now to the reason i'm writing. I'm currently working on a mobile game for iOS and android (and maybe more …) which requires some server side action. Since i'm not that experienced in managing scaleable server architectures, i thought that GAE could help me out a lot. So i started reading into the documentation a few days ago, but now i'm uncertain about how to implement our application with GAE. I already read some discussions here and on other sites, but some of them seam to be "open-ended" while others are fairly old. So please forgive me if i ask something already answered. Basically, my game creates hosted multiplayer games for up to 4 players (maybe more later on) per game (of course there are more games at the same time). Within each game, the players send messages to the server (or make http requests), the server checks the request and broadcasts the message to all players. The difficult part would be the last one, where the server pushes messages to the clients, because i need to be as fast as possible broadcasting those messages. For what i know, i have the following options (well, in theory): a) each client polls every X seconds updates from the server, which seams to be fairly slow (?) b) the channels api, which states that it is meant to be used in multiplayer games, but unfortunately lacks support of other client apis than the js api. I read about a python and java implementations but everyone warns about, if google changes the protocol, that those implementations would stop working. I'm also aware of the hidden webview method on iOS, but i don't think that this is an excellent way for cross platform applications. By the way, is it true that the channels api uses long polling and the gtalk services on the server? and c) xmpp Since i would like to keep my application in one place, i would prefer not to host my own xmpp server (which would allow me anonymous jids, right?) and unfortunately the GAE api is "only" a xmpp client. I'm still thinking about the down-sides of allowing the user to sign in with their own xmpp accounts (well in addition to that they have to subscribe too), but i really don't like the additional sign-in process. I'm also not sure if it's 100% secure to limit the messages to the game client (through the jid ressource) so that the user won't receive game messages in his other clients. I thought about registering one gtalk account and use it within the game client (register each client with a unique ressource, or maybe with a ressource per game). So basically the GAE app would send messages to my_customapp [at] gmail [dot] com/<uniqueuserid>, but i'm not sure if this would be allowed by google. Maybe someone here has some information about that? oh, and of course d) another service (which probably means more work) and sockets :( I know that this isn't an easy to answer question, and i'm sorry for that, and thank you to everyone who made it this far (:D). I hope that some of you can share their experiences and/or knowledge. Maybe i'm understanding something wrong or i'm just looking into the wrong direction. Thanks! Christoph -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/-/ciJbGD5qqWIJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
