Re: [Rails-devel] Making Rails more suted to fast interactive play. Was [18xx] Programing a Windows 18XX Moderator

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 6:46 AM, John A. Tamplin <ja...@ja...> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Rick Westerman <wes...@pu...>
> wrote:
>>
>> I also do not wish to disparage John Tamplin's (and others) ideas about
>> using Google Apps or similar in order to provide for a more intelligent
>> client/server, cloud, HTML5 way of approaching the usability issues.  The
>> above are more my thoughts on 'can we make Rails more usable with some
>> tweaks' rather than a way of saying "this is the best way to do things."
>
> I am just saying storing files on a server and picking them up, loading and
> processing the file, saving the file, etc is highly inefficient for running
> a distributed game, compared to all clients seeing all the actions from the
> server as they happen and getting notification directly that it is your turn
> rather than waiting for dropbox to replicate the save file, Rails noticing
> the file is updated (which is also problematic to notice when replication is
> complete to avoid reading a partially replicated file), and replaying all
> the actions in the game to get to the state for the next turn, etc.
> Note that I am not saying that HTML5 is needed, just suggesting that was a
> way to get a client to run across platforms including iPhone/iPad/Pre, which
> otherwise would be hard to target with a Java codebase.
> --
> John A. Tamplin
>


Moving to a client/server model also solves many of these same problems.

If we can have a server process running somewhere that people can
connect to, play their turn, and optionally disconnect, that solves
much of the same file shuffling problems.

The server could be set up with a REST or XMLRPC interface, or
something similar that allows the creation of a web-based front end
while still allowing more full-featured clients to work as well.

I think I may have some time in the near future to work on getting the
code in better shape to support something like this.

---Brett.