I missed you

[kaos78414]

I apologize for lack of activity from me, I've been busy with a new job and haven't had much time for my pet projects these days. So I definitely hope to stick around this time (time permitting), and I'm hoping to get back into it browser game dev, so I came back to the forums and saw that you guys are indeed keeping with the times (I haven't had a chance to watch the node.js tutorials, yet, though).

It feels like not that long ago I was asking you guys about implementing web sockets in PHP, and now that node has been out for some time I'm confident that it's a great platform for developing especially if you want to utilize web sockets for multiplayer games. I've played quite a bit with socket.io and express, and dabbled in various frameworks like sails.js and derby and more recently meteor. I have not yet worked with impact, but upon seeing what it can do, I may go ahead and purchase it, as it looks very powerful. I also dabbled a bit in C# development in XNA 4.

I have a few specific projects that I'd like to begin work on here in the near future, but I definitely want to get back into the swing of things before diving in (I also have to make a decision as to what software I want to use exactly). At my latest job, we do quite a bit of different things between the team members - one of our sites is developed in Rails, one is just a simple Wordpress site, another is PHP in the Symfony 2 framework (which I highly recommend), and we have our mobile apps (though I haven't had to touch the iPhone app just yet, thankfully). We're also about to make the switch on our mobile apps to HTML5, so that should be a fun learning experience in mobile design/development.

So that's the skinny on what I've been up to, and it sort of leads into the question I have for those of you that know/remember me (those of you that don't, feel free to answer too!): What are you working on these days? What frameworks/platforms are you working in?

For me, it would depend on the project. For something that didn't require realtime multiplayer, such as a PBBG, I could see Rails or Symfony being awesome platforms for this. The great thing about those frameworks is they both have excellent DB abstraction layers, (Doctrine in the case of Symfony 2 and Active Record in the case of Rails). You could get something up in running in no time. If I have time, maybe I could do some Symfony 2 PBBG tutorials to give back to this excellent community.

For a multiplayer browser game, I would definitely go with node.js, although I'm a bit torn as to what framework / packages I would use. My list of must-have packages is very short: Stylus. Other then that, I can live with or without just about any other package. As mentioned above, I'm definitely interested in using a framework, as they typically provide the boilerplate-free style of development that I enjoy (I want to develop a game, and not have to worry about working on a router or an auth library). Why reinvent the wheel, after all?

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Oh, and I've missed you! How are you guys?

[Jackolantern]

Nice to see you again! I am working in node at the moment. I am actually working on a PBBG/MUD hybrid using node, Socket.io, MongoDB and Express. I guess you could call it more of an enhanced MUD, where there will be buttons and pop-up menus to do some of the functions that are more difficult to visualize in a MUD, such as inventory or auction houses. Besides those frameworks/libraries/DB, I am pretty much doing it all from scratch. It is going pretty well so far, and I am loving node. I think it is going to be my platform of choice for at least the foreseeable future. I am also interested after this project into digging into a JS framework such as Backbone. It is just hard to keep client-side JS organized and to prevent it from turning into a "Smart UI" (which is not a good thing lol). I love JS, though, and love the flexibility it offers (JSON is just so freaking handy).

[kaos78414]

Yeah I totally forgot to mention Backbone. Backbone is great, and so is underscore. Meteor has a backbone package you can install to get backbone functionality out of the box, which is nice.

A lot of node frameworks I mentioned are built on familiar packages. Sails for instance is built on top of socket.io and express, can use Mongo DB, and allows you to scaffold models like Rails (it can also build a fully functional RESTful API with just a few console commands). I may wind up going the same route as you, though, if only to get a better understanding of the underlying architecture, since developing on a framework may run into issues with the framework itself. Especially since so many of them have not yet matured, and minimal testing has been done.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Welcome back! Node is great! I have been back and forth on a couple frameworks myself but to be honest most of my time has went to .net lately.

[Jackolantern]

I have had my eyes on Meteor for some time now, and am interested to see how it shapes up as it gets more mature. What are your thoughts on it?

[kaos78414]

Hey Halls!

@Jackolantern
I've only gone so far as a few basic tutorials to get the gist of it, but it seems extremely powerful. Although, they include some things that, while nice to have, seem like something that should have been done after version 1.0. For example, they have a bunch of login packages that allow you to integrate easily with Facebook, G+, even GitHub sign-in, with almost literally no work on your part. And that would be great, but it just feels like the time could've been better managed (unless of course it was done by a third party contributor).

But there are a few great things about it, to be sure. For one, it uses the regular Mongo commands as the database access, so you can do things like:

Code: Select all

User.find({"name": "kaos78414"});

If you're used to MongoDB that's certainly a plus. It also sort of interlaces the client and server code bases, which is great for keeping things DRY. And the backbone package is nice; certainly helps you organize the larger projects. But the one thing that people seem to take issue with is the fact that it uses Fibers instead of the normal node callback style. I personally didn't have a problem with it, but I don't think one way is really better then the other. If that isn't your style though, you may not like it.

As it stands, my main concern is the speed. I'd be curious how it stacks up to other MVVM style frameworks, like Mojito (http://developer.yahoo.com/cocktails/mojito/) or Derby JS. These things are so new that there really aren't any benchmarks out there, and I honestly wouldn't know where to start in order to make one.

Ultimately, though, being familiar with node as you are you may be more comfortable with Derby. I also think Sails may be worth a shot for games, though it's not exactly like the other frameworks (Sails is MVC, and a bit more traditional). I'll probably experiment a bit with all of them.

[Jackolantern]

Very cool! I will have to check some of those out (possibly Derby). For right now I feel pretty fulfilled with Express (especially since my current project is pretty close to a SPA), but perhaps for my next web project I will try out a more complete framework

[Jackolantern]

I also wonder if others have been having the same experience as I have with node. I have realized that my code tends to be correct on the first test much more often than with any other platform I have ever worked with, meaning that I wrote it correctly to begin with. I don't think this is something tracked that often, but I believe around 70% of the time, my code is correct as it was originally written. With many other languages, it is probably between about 40 - 50%. It has allowed me to make a lot of progress in a fairly small amount of time.

[kaos78414]

I'm not sure it's node alone, so much as the advancement of tools and frameworks etc., but I've experienced a similar phenomenon.

But it's probably a combination of our growing experience levels, along with the more advanced tools. I find that in Symfony or Rails, the code works the way I expect the first time more often then not, though I couldn't give accurate statistics.

[kaos78414]

Oh by the way, I bought a book today called Discover Meteor. It was a little overpriced IMO, at 40$, but I figured why not. There aren't a whole lot of tutorials available, and I want to get the best understanding as quickly as possible. Hopefully I'll have more to report on about Meteor when I finish the book's tutorials.

The book is taking me through building a social news site, similar to Reddit I suppose. Here's a screenshot after 3 chapters / about 40 minutes:
http://i.imgur.com/n7JHHrD.png

I should mention how awesome Twitter's bootstrap library is for getting that sleek app look.