I want to make a multiplayer card game for Facebook which will work on a client-server design: A server outside Facebook that will host the game and hold all the logic, and a client-side app which will be implemented in Facebook so users from Facebook can play and compete each other and gain higher scores.
I want animation of moving cards (for example the animation like in the texas hold’m poker game).
What technologies do you recommend using for both the client and server sides of this?
Is WPF something I can use here? Or do I need to use Silverlight (which, I understand, has only a subset of the features of WPF)?
Should I use Java Applet and make something in Swing? Do I have a better way to implement it all in Java?
I’d personally opt for using canvas (the new HTML5 element) for the client side if facebook allows it. True, it’s not supported everywhere but Java applets are dying out and I can see silverlight and flash going the same way.
If you want to use Java to do it, you can check out GWT and the GWT-canvas plugin. It’ll let you write everything in Java but it’ll compile down to Javascript (with the added bonus that browsers that don’t support HTML5 will fall back to using a plugin.)
In terms of the server side logic, it doesn’t really matter what you implement it in, just choose what you feel comfortable with and go with it (Java servlets, Php, ASP.NET, all will be up for the job.)