[jdev] how to program a jabber game server

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Richard Dobson wrote:

>> Have you looked at http://volity.org/?
>
> Yea, but id rather not go down that route as I dont like the way it uses RPC 
> rather than a more standard xmpp like way using a properly defined xml 
> protocol.

Hi -- I'm one of the Volity developers. I missed this discussion 
yesterday, but I can comment on how Volity got the way it is.

The early Volity discussions went very much like this one: we need a "game 
layer", which can handle players invitations, game membership, chat, 
outcome recording.

And one big bullet point was: use the Jabber standards. Ironically. :-) 
The point of using XML-RPC was not to bypass the "standard XMPP way" of 
doing things, but to *be* a standard XMPP way of doing things. (Similarly, 
a lot of the game discovery uses standard service discovery, with a 
soupcon of XEP-0115.)

The idea was to make the "game layer" sit cleanly on top of Jabber. That 
way we could concentrate on making it do what we needed, without requiring 
Jabber to change each time we came up with a new idea. Proposing Volity as 
a JEP[*] would have been like building a play-by-email game by requesting 
an extension to RFC822.

Similarly, we thought it would be better for all games to use a "bot" 
referee, rather than putting game code in the server. Better separation. 
(And this proved true, because we changed the server software on 
volity.net a couple of times, with only the smallest hitches to the game 
system.)

[* This was before XEP.]

--Z

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