Question

I am writing a small game in android that basically is a turn-based boardgame, and I am having some questions about my multiplayer design, if it’s good of bad practice.

The required speed of the client-server communication is slow at best, much like wordfeud, so I have used AsyncTask to do what I need, examples of tasks are: LoginTask, RegisterUserTask, StartGameTask, PlayMoveTask.

To initialize I can write:

VerifyUserTask verify = new VerifyUserTask();
verify.execute(username, password);

On the serverside I have a php script that takes the parameters sent in, and returns a result.

Back to the android again I might need to wait for a reply using

Boolean verified = verify.get(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

The verifybit is rarely used, it’s only when I need to verify that the user really is a valid user with a valid password.

I know this works, but is it an ok solution? Considering it’s lightweight, fast enough, and I can log errors and responses.

Thanks in advance…

Answer 1

Try to avoid using AsyncTask for everything. It will bring you more problems than solutions.

Create an Android Service to handle all the backend logic and find a way to comunicate with your activities.

I would recommend you learning about SyncAdapters. Here is a blog post with a nice introduction.