I'm designing a game where players are programmed bots competing in a programming contest. The bots can be programmed in any language - Java, Ruby, Python, C#. I'm looking for some way to transmit game data across the network or some way by which the game server can talk to the bots. What would be a better choice for this? Should i use XMPP or some other form of remote method invocation?
A:
A REST based webservice might be easier to use if you need lots of languages to be able to call it.
David
2010-03-02 15:06:41
It's not a webapp. Its a desktop app written in QtRuby. But REST still doesn't answer how i can send/receive messages from bots using PUSH.
Sathish
2010-03-02 15:18:16
A:
The issue with many Remoting infrastructures are that they are normally not portable between frameworks. While XMPP might work for you - the main issue you might find is excessive data crossing the network due to all the header/presence stuff in the data being sent around. Also as XMPP is XML based any binary data would have to be sent around as a Base64 string.
A better bet might be a more low level socket interface - either way having the freedom to do bit-packing to reduce the size of the data will possibly be beneficial.
saret
2010-03-02 15:35:09
Your advice is to build his own messaging or RMI infrastructure which supports multiple languages?!?
Robin
2010-03-03 21:43:10
He's building a game, not a business app - there might be considerable more network traffic - my point was that a lower level framework/communication mechanism would be beneficial - and that for a game which has a game server, exposing web-service like communication has alot of overhead and that with RMI you need to be wary of non-portable mechanisms - java can't use .Net remoting....If he chooses to go the messaging route I wouldn't recommend that he use build his own middleware - that would be crazy, but using durable messaging for a game's communication might also be crazy
saret
2010-03-04 06:55:38
Also his question wasn't about only what framework should he use if you read it ("Should i use XMPP or some other form of remote method invocation?")- he was also asking if XMPP or one of the remote procedure call (RPC) mechanisms such as RMI/DCOM/Corba/.Net Remoting built into some of the listed frameworks/languages (Java, Ruby, Python, C#) will work and I was stating that it's not necessarily a portable route to go - besides it can have other issues as well going this route
saret
2010-03-04 07:20:21
@Robin - where did I recommend that? You shouuld definately not reinvent the wheeel - but at the same time you should use the tool/component that is suited for the type of work you're doing
saret
2010-03-10 06:48:04
A:
I always find reinventing the wheel to be tedious. Try and see if you can use OpenTNL.
fuzzy lollipop
2010-03-02 15:36:45
+1
A:
What you are descibing is not an RMI problem but a messaging one. I am sure there are several solutions you could use, and based on the limited knowledge of your application, I would say that XMPP is one of them. It is language agnostic and has libraries (and servers) available in most well supported languages.
Whether it is the best solution, I couldn't say, but I would think it is a viable one. It gives you the option for transmitting from point to point, point to many points, and a means for your game server to broadcast to all clients.
Robin
2010-03-03 21:38:16