I have been looking into android development for some time and would really like to create a networked game. I also think this would be an excellent oppurtunity to familiarize myself with the app engine framework, but it seems more app engine applications are built around browser services.
This is not nessecarily a problem for me, but I do not want this to appear as a browser based game (I want live chat, more dynamic interaction/movement/combat). I have been looking into AJAX/Java as a possible solution, but I am having trouble visualizing how i will actually connect the app to the server, since all tutroials I have found seem to be hosted web applications. Are there any resources for android applications hooking transparently into App Engine services?
Or maybe there is a better service similar to app engine I should look into.
Thanks! (if i was unclear about anything let me know)
AppEngine is completely prejudiced towards delivering web applications: HTTP in, HTTP out. So, as long as you can design your game’s communication layer to be implementable in HTTP (stateless, finite-life requests) there’s no reason that this wouldn’t work.
Your game doesn’t have to run in a browser to use an HTTP-based API to communicate with the server. I doubt that there are any special “transparent” communication libraries between Andriod and AppEngine, as the web request-style of communication that is possible with AppEngine is effectively indistinguishable from the same techniques that would be used to communicate with any other HTTP-based API running on any platform.