I’m working on an Android game based on Playing Cards (Bridge, to be precise), which can be played by four players at time. And there’ll be a server available via Web, to which devices will connect, and server will keep track of game progress.
My game is very basic when it comes to graphics that I can attain the UI without using any gaming engine.
While I’m supposed to build the game (the client) for Android, I wanted to develop server which can be RE-USED in future ports of the game, even if it is ported to other mobile platforms or even desktop.
So I thought of first possible candidate for server architecture was having RESTful Web Service so that I can leverage the server with any client as long as the client’s programming end supports HTTP methods.
But later I realized that since there’ll be persistent connection between devices and the server throughout the game session, would it be okay to have such a server, where connection will terminate after the request is responded (I’m not sure if it is true)?
Or shall I use DatagramSocket and DatagramPacket way of Java to build the server? (will that ensure re-usability of server?)
Any other suggestions or recommendations?
Note: I’m not new to Java or Network Programming in Java, but I’m new to both Android Development and creating RESTful services.
I think your HTTP-based plan is appropriate for this situation, I don’t think the question of persistence of connection is relevant for a slow turned based game such as bridge.
Edit: as suggested by tdreger almost all Android docs recommend that you plan for routine connection failure and reestablishment through a different channel, as such the html connection seems the most resilient solution.
I think your idea of making it client-side independent is correct and important – in this light the HTTP idea is clearly much better in that it will be much easier to code client-side applications in other languages (which you will probably want – Javascript for a web-client and objective-C for an iOS app).
I also think the Android development will be easier as Android and appache have strong support for these HTTP-like connections.