Spacecrime - Technical Notes

"Aries", the creator and author of this game, though no longer the current owner or administrator, would like to take a bit of space to offer you the straight scoop on what makes spacecrime.net tick. Spacecrime is built on the backs of years of effort from thousands of developers in the open source community. Without the tools and components created in dozens of open software projects, his individual contributions would have created exactly nothing.

Credits

linklord.com - The author is a partner in linklord.com, which provides virtual hosting and low cost server location services. spacecrime.net depends upon linklord.com's reliable network infrastructure and facilities so spacecrime.net can talk to your browsers. Thank God for linklord.com . So remember that linklord.com loves you when you want to spend money to put a site or computer on the 'net.

Sun Microsystems - Not exactly open source, but they've put Java on every computer that I give a snit about. Just about everything you see and do here is under the auspices of a Java Virtual Machine, and I love it.

Apache Jakarta Project - Tomcat, THE reference implementation for a servlet engine, is a bullet proof and speedy home for spacecrime.net's servlet-based web application. The AJP13 web connector promises to let the game scale-out should it become very popular.

Apache XML Project - The web application for the game is extended from Apache's Cocoon 2.0.3, with custom actions, XSPs, logicsheets, and XSL stylesheets to connect you to the game. Apache's Xerces parser and Xalan transformer packages are the metal for Cocoons pedals.

Apache Web Server - Our front door - handles connections from browsers, logs them, and runs your sticky sessions to our Tomcat engines.

Jboss - Our Tomcat engines rest comfortably embedded into a JBoss server, which in turn provide handy services and pooled resources via JNDI to the web application. JBoss also schedules and runs the game's time-based batch processes right there in the same JVM, sharing components and resources. JBoss's hot deployment features and JMX manageability let us make changes with (relatively) little fear.

Castor JDO and XML - Castor is used where feasible to map Java objects representing game state in and out of the database, and out to XML for use in output pipelines. After the learning curve started to taper, I found this framework to be VERY productivity enhancing. I do worry that the JDO layer may be expensive from a performance standpoint. So I bypassed it in favor of direct JDBC for high volume batch operations, player ranking lists, etc. But that is the exception, not the rule.

MySQL - The newest versions of MySQL include full transaction support and row-level locking via the InnoDB tables. It's plenty fast, and its free. We'on the MF. The MM type 4 JDBC driver ties MySQL to scheduled jobs and web applications via JBoss-provided connection pools.

NetBeans - NetBeans provides a fantastic open source pure Java IDE. Code goes in and out of my brain, my CVS repository, and my development JBoss server's deploy directory all from my NetBeans GUI. The integrated Jakarta ant support provides easy access to build features.

PimpWar - Pimpwar was far and away the inspiration for this game. I enjoyed playing a few games of Pimpwar a couple of years ago. Sadly, their black market goods auction feature 'fell' out of the game due to technical difficulties. IMHO, it was heart of the game --- the part that made it good. I thought I could pull off a game with a brainy economic angle, and build systems to take the load. Think I can pull it off? ;^)

FYI: I don't intend on releasing any game code to the public during the game's active life, but I may release some non-game-specific components at some point in the future. These could include my authentication and user registration components, associated cocoon components, selected utility components, and examples of the integration between JBoss, Castor, Cocoon, etc. There are some bureaucratic hurdles, though, and at the moment I don't feel like dealing with any of them. You can play the game. So be happy.

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