Technology consulting on an online game-playing website

The client

This is an emerging software design & development company based in UK .

What the client wanted

The client desired a special game-playing website through which people could play Chinese Chess online and be ranked according to the results. Only the rough requirement was provided by client mainly covering the following scope:

• Tournament application: to achieve the functions like tournament, watching game, ranking, chat etc.
• Website: to be AAA or AA compliant to make sure it is accessible to people with disabilities. The website should provide the functions such as online registration, login, search, news and events etc.
• Content Management System (CMS): to provide a powerful back-end management to maintain the website.

Solution

As the requirement the client provided was quite rough, Abstract Technology's consultants, in the first phase, were dedicated to collecting and clarifying the requirement. In the following phase, we focused on analysing the requirement from the technology angle, and confirmed that some difficult points were feasible in technology. Open source resources were recommended to be utilized in order that the development cost was slashed. It was suggested that the website and CMS be realized by common J2EE and Linux structure to guarantee the security, reliability and scalability of the system. Moreover, the game server & chat server was needed to be built.

According to the client, the number of target players would reach hundreds of thousands, which made high demands of the server. In order to economize resources, we adopted Cookie technology instead of Session to track users.

The tournament application could be divided into client side and server side. Client side was responsible for the Chinese Chess's moving rules and sending message to the server. Server side was responsible for receiving message from client and transmitting it to others. The core function of this part was the communication between game server and client. Abstract Technology proposed that Java Socket be used to solve the problem as Socket was the most suitable for programming client-server applications. Utilizing Socket, the server side and the client side could conveniently complete all the socket communication of network based the TCP/IP protocol. Applet was adopted, which would be automatically downloaded to PC and act as a Socket client. With regard to the chat function, Abstract Technology recommended to use NFC chat to realize it depending on the experience in chat room development based on Java Socket technology.

The technology of JMS (Java Messaging Service) is also used to provide asynchronous communication between components in the distributed computing environment. JMS works in concert with other technologies to form the reliable and flexible system integrating the mutually isolated components.

The proven architecture and some other technologies that Abstract Technology has ever successfully and repetitiously used were also applied to the system design such as Struts, Spring and hibernate etc. Finally, the multi-layer architecture and the specification with the concrete database design were composed by Abstract Technology's architects.

The benefits

• A tangible and substantial solution was provided.
• The development cost would be largely cut down.
• Offered the comprehensive technical support which increased the work efficiency on the client's side.

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