I'm trying to make a simple tic-tac-toe online multiplayer game in Play Framework in Java (but I can read Scala too) and I need to notify one client when the other client has made a move - has inserted a new database entry. The frontend uses HTML and JS.
Do I use WebSockets or Server Sent Events for this and how?
Thanks a lot guys, the Play framework documentation for both is still not updated and it's a well known issue https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/5057 as well.
EDIT: The main question here is really how to do it?
Personally for a game I would establish a Web Socket connection over a SSE.
Fast data transfers
A two way stream of message, where SSE would require the client to send ajax requests and listen to SSE where WS all sits in one place.
Allows you to establish when one of the 2 clients looses connections, thus pausing or notifying the other player.
Resource you can use to Implement this:
https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/ScalaWebSockets
Edit: Latest version https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.6.x/ScalaWebSockets
Related
Purpose:
I'm trying to make a real-time web service in Java. When there're changes in database, the data in clients(probably Android client) will be changed automatically without refreshing.
Platform:
I'm using Tomcat 7 container and Axis2.
Problems:
I'm stuck in the way to approach. I've realized that there were 2 ways:
1. When the data in server changes, notice to all the clients. Web-service allows us to do this, but I don't know what clients I have to inform!
2. Clients connect to the server, keep the connection alive and whenever there's a change, update data. However, if the client is the handheld, it will consume much power and data exchange over 3G network.
I know that's a complicated problem. So I just want to ask if there is an efficient way to approach? And if possible, anyone can give me one example of realtime web service like this?
I've searched over many pages, but nothing's helpful. Can anyone give me some suggestions? Tkx!
Is it a requirement to use webservices or Axis? Otherwise, you might be interested in WebSockets. These are connections over plain HTTP that provide two way communication. Your clients will connect to your server, and as soon as new data is available your server can push data to every connection it knows of, thus informing all clients that are connected.
I currently have a multiplayer card game developed and working in Java and it is working in the console. The game is similar in format to Bridge and Spades, minus the bidding process. It is a four-player game, and players take turns playing a card.
I am currently working to convert this to a browser-based webapp, and am adding Spring MVC, and using HTML, JavaScript, and AJAX for the UI and communication with the backend. I have a good idea of the approach I want to take on getting this to work single-player against the AI, allowing the user to play their card and using an AJAX call to get the next three plays from the server.
However, I'm wondering what kind of approach I would need to take for this to be multiplayer. I have seen some references to "Socket-programming," which I am unfamiliar with, but those seem to revolve around Java applets, instead of a browser-based app.
Basically, I am looking for a way to ensure that when a user starts a game and someone else joins, how do I ensure that they are connected to the same game, and are able to see each others' plays? I am asking this now before I have the UI fully developed for single-player, because I want to avoid a complete redesign to support multiplayer functionality.
Since you are creating a multiplayer game, you will need to have at least one server for your client(s) to connect to. Since you want to make this browser based, you will most likely need your own server (rather than having one of the clients be a server). When a user joins a game, it is logged on the server where that user is. When a player performs an action, the server processes the action, then sends a notification to each of the other clients connected to that room. At that point the clients UI updates.
In the past, you could not do this with pure HTML / JavaScript as you cannot open a socket. Which means, the server could not notify the clients. However in HTML5 you should be able to use WebSockets to achieve what you are doing with a server in the middle. The WebSocket API
However, if you don't want to use HTML5 WebSockets, there is another technique that imitates Sockets in JavaScript. That is, the server can talk to the clients. This technique is called long polling. The client sends a request to the server asking for an update, if there is no update available, the server holds the request until an update is available and sends it back to the client at which point they make another update request. Simple Long Polling Example
Another option, if you are very familiar with Java you may wish to check out Google Web Toolkit. GWT is a subset of Java that is compiled into HTML and JavaScript for the front end and if needed creates a Server Side java executable that you can use with TomCat or another web service. In this option, you have a few libraries that allow you to write socket-style code that will be compiled into Long Polling JavaScript.
Best of luck!
I want to create an application using pushing mechanism. i.e. without user interaction we can push the messages to the client when some thing is happend in the server, similar to what gmail is done for their emails and facebook recent activity messages.
How can i implement this one using java.
Please help, Thanks in advance.
One technique to achive this is taking advantage of the long-polling method.
The client opens up a connection to the server, but instead of instantly returning the result, the server holds the connection for a period of time and delays his response.
If something happens, that causes the server response to trigger (new mail, new instant message ... ), the server finally answers to the client. Or, in the case the request runs in timeout, the server just passes an empty result.
In both cases, the client processes the response and instantly makes a new request, for the whole thing to start again.
In Java, the client side may do simple requests. The server side should be properly threaded, and the timout should not be set too long.
Also, please have a look at this SO thread:
Each webserver/appserver has a pool of threads, say 10 threads for processing web requests, if all those threads will go into 'sleep' no other web request will be serviced until one of those 'sleeps' exists.
What you need is called as Comet aka Reverse Ajax, there are multiple such implementation both paid and free.
Depending upon programming language you choose you can choose one of the following:
Tomcat Reverse Ajax.
Jetty Comet.
DWR
Streamhub (Paid but has a community edition)
APE. (Free not available for Windows)
Atmosphere (Used in Primefaces)
CometD by Dojo.
Or just use Pusher API. You use their REST service to publish events and Pusher then delivers these events to all clients via websockets. The API is easy to use and supports multiple channels.
Though a late answer , here is my take on how to do server push.You can use the socket-io framework coupled with nodejs.The socket-io client has to listen to events and the socket-io on the nodejs ( server ) can emit ( push ) the messages , the client ( socket-io in webpage ) picks it up and can do whatever it wants.There is a catch,you should know a little bit of javascript.The socket-io protocol is transport agnostic too !
Here are the links
An excellent writeup on using socket-io and nodejs
Socket-io
nodejs
I'm programming an Android multi-player game, which basically consist of a server where the clients connect and exchange messages. When the player connects to a server, a player list is return to him/her. A player can then select a user to challenge - of course he must select a player from the player list, which only contains connected users.
When a player1 challenges player2, a message needs to be transmitted from player1 to the server, which in turn must send a message to the player2, notifying him about the challenge. The player2 can then accept/decline the challenge.
I can use the following techniques to make this happen:
Use custom server/client with Java socket programming. The server basically accepts a connection from the client, spawning a new thread for each connected client. The problem with this are:
There needs to be a persistent connection open from client to server wasting battery life of the android phone. This is not really big limitation since the battery isn't consumed that much.
When I'll want to develop another game I'll have to rewrite the client/server code from the scratch - also choosing another port to listen for incoming connections - the whole concept gets rather difficult to maintain.
I'm also worried if this is the way to do it. Spawning another thread for each clients sound quite a lot if thousands clients are connecting at the same time. But I'm guessing the PC games do it like this. Not sure about android.
Use Java REST jersey to build the client-server on top of HTTP. This would be a perfect solution if the server could easily send notifications to clients. There are actually multiple design decisions here:
the client pulls the server for any new data/notifications every few seconds - this is really bad, since we're stuck with non responsiveness, delay, etc.
the client can send a waiting request to server, so the client receives the response only after some data becomes available. This is better, but can still produce a delay when two notifications one after another need to be sent to the user. The first notification is sent instantly, since the client already has a connection open, waiting for data to receive. But we would have to wait for the client to initiate another long http request to receive the second notification. The problem gets bigger as there are multiple notifications that need to be send in a row to a specific client.
the client can initiate a http streaming, where the communication is left open when the request is handled, so the server can also send multiple messages to client whenever it wishes. The problem here is that I don't know how well this works on Android. I've looked at several implementations:
Java jersey + atmosphere: didn't succeed in actually making it work. This seems the most promising, but I don't want to spend too much time on it, since I'm not even sure if it does what I want.
Deacon: seems pretty neat, but after seen the video tutorial on their official web page, I'm not sure that it can do what I need. When a player1 challenges player2, can it send a notification to player2 letting it know about the match request?
I would be glad to know how other multi-player games handle the network communications, if the two players are playing the game over the network.
I'm also open to a totally new suggestion how to achieve what I want. I can pretty much code anything, so don't hesitate to let me know of some more difficult way to achieve the network communication.
Let me also mention that I'll be glad to implement a totally specific method to work in my case, so it can be anything that will do the job done, but I'm also looking at more general way for communication between clients and server. So that I can program an interface/whatever and reuse the code in other android games, android applications.
I hope I presented the problem allright and that I'll receive some valuable answers.
Thank you
You should take a look at XMPP. It's a protocol (originally created for chat programs) that allows sending of xml data between users.
It has a separated client-server relationship, so that you can focus on developing a client application fit for phones, and a different server depending on your needs.
There are loads of information available on the protocol (I should know, I wrote a thesis about using the protocol in game applications), but you can start by looking it up on wikipedia to see if it is what you want.
aSmack is a library for creating android xmpp-clients. It takes some tweaking to set it up and get everything to work, but once you do, it's neat.
EDIT: relating to the answer suggesting using the C2DM:
from the c2dm docs "Sending large numbers of C2DM messages":
Are you sending C2DM messages too frequently? If you need to communicate with your application frequently over a short period of
time, C2DM is probably not the best solution. Instead, consider
implemeting XMPP or your own protocol to exchange messages, and use
C2DM only to send the initial notification.
It sounds like Android Cloud-to-Device-Messaging might be what you need
Push notifications without the app having to keep a connection open
I would vote in favor of some message passing technique - like activeMQ, rabbitMQ, zeroMQ eor something like it. On the server side you may stick with java , or javascript ( like
node.js ) - such solution would provide most performance and minimal latencies.
If latency is not that critical, you may as well use REST calls with JSON
I'm working on a browser game with the play framework, and I definitely need longpolling, but I don't quite understand how to use it. WebSockets would be perfect for this, but it's not supported by that many browsers yet.
Here's what I want to do: When the user logs in, and navigates to the play game controller, I want to start a connection, and keep it open. I want to do this for all users that are online, so I can show a list of them on the site, so they can play with each other. I've looked at the documentation, but I don't understand how I could implement it in my case. Because there simply isn't anything I want to calculate (in the example they're generating a pdf) I just want the connection to stay open.
What I'm also wondering is, how I should keep track of all these open connections? Right now, I just have an online column in my users table in the database, which I update. SO everytime someone connects I have to update the database. Are there better ways to do this, or is this fine?
And lastly, assuming all of the above works. When player A, selects player B to play with: how do I notify player B of this? Do I just send some JSON code, and change the page with javascript, on player B's side, or do I send him to a totally different page? I'm not sure how to communicate when the two connections are established and the game has started.
Firstly, I think you need to appreciate the difference between Websockets and Long Polling.
Websockets creates a connection and keeps it open until the browser terminates the session, via some javascript or the user moving on from the page. This would give you the desired nature of what you are requesting. Looking at the Chat example in the Play download will show you how an entire Chat application is handled using Websockets.
Further to Pere's answer regarding Play's statelessness. The Play creators have suggested that a single Websocket connection, regardless of how long it is open for and how many requests are sent back and forther, is considered to be a single transaction. Therefore, saving to the database in between each Websocket request is not needed (again, you can see that nothing is saved in the Chat example). Using this method, you would be expected to save the details when the Websocket is finally closed, or indeed all Websockets, depending on your use-case.
Long Polling on the other hand opens a connection to the server, and the server simply waits until there is something to send back to the client. If you need to push any data to the server, you would do this as a separate AJAX request, so you would effectively have two requests open at once. You don't necessarily know when a user logs off, unless you send a request just as they leave the page, to let the server know they have gone, but this is not always successful. Long Polling can work, but it is not as neat a solution as Websockets, but as you say, this is not widely supported yet.
My suggestion would be to study the Chat example (as it has a Long Polling and Websockets version). This will be the most effective way to get up and running with your requirements.
As for your final query regarding how to notify the other player. In Long Polling, you would simply respond to the suspended request with some JSON. With websockets, you would send an event back to the client. Again, both approaches can be pretty clearly figured out from the Chat example.
I have also written a Blog post on Websockets, which may help you understand this process a little better.
On the Websocket part, as you can see here (1st answer) the support is not so bad, and you have a Javascript fallback if there is some problem with the browser. This would simplify your scenario, as long polling may be more complicated to manage.
On the issue of keeping track, as Play is stateless you have to store the flag in the database and remove it when they close the connection. Otherwise you are breaking the statelessness.
About the notification, you have to send some message to B, but don't move them to another page as it may be confusing and cause bad user experience. Use Json to pop some message (in a div) alerting them of the game starting or the request to play.
I'm not using the "play" framework.
But I've been lately researching and tinkering with http-based long polling. Websockets, if available, is much more appropriate for realtime messages!
As for long-polling, I found that using a "cargo truck" analogy helped me reason about long-polling quite effectively. Here's a little note I wrote on the subject:
http://dvb.omino.com/blog/2011/http-comet-realtime-messages/
Perhaps you or future greppers may find it useful.
You might also want to take a look at the Juggernaut project which is based on node.js and Redis and gives you a "realtime connection between your servers and your client browsers". When using a Java Redis client like Jedis, you should easily be able to integrate the whole thing with the Play framework!