Me and my startup app company is working on a turn based multiplayer iPhone application. Let it be said that neither one of us have any database, or server, knowledge whatsoever. Though, we are willing to learn.
The flow of the game will be similar to such games as: WordFeud, WordsWithFriends, Rumble etc.
Let me start of by where a lot of searching on the web has gotten us:
We have decided to use CouchDB as a tool for storing information about users, game sessions and other stuff. CouchDB is an open source noSQL database system. The reason is that we have been taught, that it should support a lot off concurring users. Besides, that it scales - we are hoping to go big, of course.
Our CouchDB, is hosted on IrisCouch. IrisCouch is an "in cloud" hosting service designed for running CouchDb.
So, we've got a CouchDB server up and running, and we know the basics on how to query data from the server.
Our biggest confusion right now, is how we should set up the system to work according to best practices. Right now we are at the point where we are able to receive and submit data to the server.
Our game is supposed to have Facebook integration, so that the users can register via our app or through Facebook. After that they can play with random matched opponents, or play with friends. After a match is started, one player will get a set of question to be asked, after he has answered, the other player should be notified, through push notification, that it's their turn. After a few rounds the game is finished.
At this point, we think this might be the best solution for the flow of the application:
A user connects to another user -> a game session is opened as a
document in a database called "games".
The newly created document contains both player names, question,
answers etc
A field named "whos_turn" decides which of the two players turn it is.
After the game has ended, the session is erased.
Again, and as you may see, we are in the dark as of how to really do it, but this is the general idea.
So, my questions goes as following:
Is it best to query the data directly from the iPhone application, or through a web service?
What is the best way to set up the database, to best manage the flow of the application?
Any information, that could lead us closer will be gladly appreciated :)
In advance, thank you!
Olav Gundersen
EDIT#1 : Our Objective-C programmer managed to connect two iPhone devices using CouchDb. The iPhone application consists of a table view, that has a concurrent connection with the database, so that when someone POST to the database, it shows up on the tableview of all the other connected phones. Behold: a severely ineffective chat system.
If is a multiplayer you would need to have the app to communicate to the remote iriscouch.db but I am concerned by the point where you state that neither you or your friends have any database experience. You are willing to learn so I think the best place to start is:
http://guide.couchdb.org/editions/1/en/index.html
There are several issue you might find with scalability if you plan to erase documents continuously. DB Size can be considerable on couchdb and you will need to compact &cleanup the db regularly. But I don't think is a major issue for now as this is at a start up level.
The question "best way to setup the database and best manage the flow of the application" should be addressed by your team. If you do not have someone with any database experience you should try to find someone willing to help you. It should be someone with extensive experience in databases. You might find some fairly reasonable professionals at http://www.odesk.com
In total honestly I don't think you will be successful if you don't have such a figure - either as a freelancer or contributor - to help you having a solid database logic in the game that will ensure a great user experience.
For example: have you considered the latency-delay issue by using a db based in the USA (Iriscouch) vs. where your users are located?
For this reason you might want to do as much as possible client side (embedded database like sqlite or touchDB that is essentially couchDB for iPhone)
For an iPhone application you might want to try TouchDB that is made exactly for that
https://github.com/couchbaselabs/TouchDB-iOS (caveat: being that you need connectivity to check turns etc this might not be the ideal solution but it could work to store some information locally).
To lay this out you would need someone with experience with couchdb to set up a proper, usable application. There is nothing wrong in being enthusiast about your idea but to make it a success you need a technical mind in the database side. Of course you might be well capable to learn this yourself. After reading the CouchDB book you should be in position to create a basic flow to fit your needs.
Of course other more experienced users might come with a more comprehensive answer or a sample layout but I don't think would be the best approach. Even if someone posts a full layout of the doc structure and how to query it how are you going to service the app if something goes awry e.g. sessions don't get deleted, conflicts etc. ? hence my sincere advice to get some ad-hoc expertise for your case.
This might also result in analyzing suitable alternatives. I don't think you should buy into the idea that CouchDB can scale and hence is the best/only option for you (of course this might well be the case and if you feel that is a good option..go for it). For example twitter, google adwords and many other online apps are using mysql to store their data so for sure CouchDB is not the only database that can scale!
I think this demo app could be a good example to follow: iOS Couchbase Demo
Related
I'm developing a websocket real time browser game ( socketio nodejs) and wanted to start implementing my database and would like to know which type of database (nosql, sql .. ) would fit my situation best.
A small description of how i intend to use it :
I want to have game rooms with all their options stored ( which can be changed frequently)
a list of the connected users and their linked accounts( if a user is a guest he won't have a linked account, however if he does it would be linked with another table containing some extra data like lvl or something like that)
a list of user thema they like ( so for example when a game starts, it will take the themas in common for all users to use the game) all typical themas are stored in another big table that has a lot of data that won't be updated in a while.
So basically I have some tables that need a lot of quick and concurrent access which get updated and deleted frequently and some that don't need it and have a lot of permanent data.
I was thinking about using mongodb but honestly don't want to commit on something i don't have experience with ( i do have sql knowledge). I need suggestions thanks
TD;LR: I would personally go with PostgreSQL.
Recently, I had the same question as you, but with the only difference, I was not looking to build game rooms. After some research, I was convinced that PostgreSQL is awesome and suitable for every project. Well, tech giants use it too, including Facebook, Uber, Netflix... (https://stackshare.io/postgresql). It is scalable, easy to set one DB up, great community with lots of tutorials (both videos and articles) and it is also extensible, as it supports JSON, which is great!
You can use a great ORM for Node.js, such as TypeORM or Sequelize. Furthermore, I suggest you take a look at GraphQL, an API that has subscriptions (real-time operations). As I guess it will be a web application, I highly recommend you to go with React.js for the front-end functionalities, which interact great with GraphQL & Node.js. Last but not least, lots of developers and companies use both MongoDB and PostgreSQL for different functionalities and purposes for each. For user's tables use PostgreSQL, for multiple "big" JSON objects use MongoDB.
I hope that helps and lets you understand what you want in a more clear way. Good luck with your project!
I am currently using meteor.js for a social networking application that I am building. Currently I am struggling to find the best way to design a newsfeed for my users. Users are able to follow each other and create posts that should theoretically go to their followers. I have come up with two possible concepts that would work theoretically.
I. When a users makes a post the post goes into the global database which every user is subscribed and listening to, and whenever a post is added the user checks to see if the parent if they are following the parent of the post, and if they are they display it onto their newsfeed.
This way seems horribly inefficient, but it is a way.
II. The other way would be for each user to have their own little "hub" or each user would just subscribe to and listen for change in the user's hub.
This way seems better but I would have to do a for-loop on startup and subscribe to each user manually. Which may cause a slight delay on startup.
I am thinking that option two will work best, but I am wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to accomplish this task. Or if there is a standard way to go about this. Thanks.
Look at the reywood:publish-composite package. I'm doing something similar in my app and am using this package to essentially perform a join. In your case people are following people so when creating a publication that returns the set of users that a person is following you can at the same time return the union of all their posts.
Building scalable feed technology is quite a hard problem to solve. With Meteor it is even harder because MongoDB doesn't lend itself very well for the storage of relational data, since it is a non-relational database, and creating publications that publish 'joined' data isn't straightforward. A lot of articles have been written about the problem of building scalable feed technology, have you seen my article on using Meteor in combination with Stream to build a solution that fits your needs?
Another route would be to use an open-source framework to create the backend for your feed technology. Have a look at Stream-Framework, the repositories README also has a great list of resources on building scalable feed technology.
I want to create a score keeping app that allows me to enter scores into the app, save score history by user, and have a webpage that can display the score in real-time as well as pump out some stats on previous games.
I've been doing some front-end development the past few years and I would say that my CSS/HTML/Javascript skills are intermediate. I have a rough game plan on how it would work, but having very little backend experience there are some gaps in my knowledge that I need help with.
The app: I would build it with what I know: CSS/HTML/Javascript. I would it to be assessable via a webpage or native app. The plan for the latter was putting it through PhoneGap.
Database: SQL? This is were I would save the scores.
The webpage: This is where things get tricky. I need live reporting for the current game status. Web sockets?
I would use a Javascript graphing library to create charts of stats based on current and previous game history. I need that data to be automatically refreshed (AJAX) but how would I do that with a SQL/JS interaction?
Also, ideally the graphs on the webpage would allow visitors to copy and paste iframe code so they can paste the stuff into their own website. I don't even know where to get started with that.
I'm not sure if I'm even asking the right questions so any help would be greatly appreciated!
Since you're a front-end developer I think you'll really like http://nobackend.org/
There are a number of Back-end as a Service solutions which handle both data persistence and data synchronising across multiple devices.
These solutions answer your SQL and WebSockets questions. You could implement these yourself using either open source solutions or by combining a number of services. But I'd give the BaaS options a go.
I am required to implement a live chat system, somewhat similar to Facebook's in that it must:
Allow communication between 2 users
Store messages in an inbox/sent box
Store messages in inbox, marked unread if the user is offline when a message is sent
A language/spam filter must also be active, as needs to monitor communication involving minors.
Ideally, this will work on most devices/browsers including mobile access.
I pretty much have a blank canvas for this project in terms of what OS/software to use.
Having done a bit of research it seems like there's a few options / things to think about?
PHP/AJAX long polling (Comet-style) with a standard LAMP stack storing messages in a mysql DB
LEMP stack (nginx)using the HTTP Push Module, again Comet-style server with a php backend storing messages in a mysql DB
Node.js?
HTML5 interface to maintain browser/device support?
Best DB system for this? Some people suggested mongoDB?
Some people also suggested utilising MemCacheQ to boost performance.
What are your thoughts this? Any suggestions?
Check out SignalR as the way of passing the messages between clients, it's the easiest way to create a chat application.
This sounds like the sort of thing that the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, Node.js) combined with either socket.io, or lightstreamer would be good at. Lightstreamer is supposedly faster and more scalable than socket.io (and their live demo's don't make me doubt that), it also has a page in their documentation discussing PhoneGap (they handle phones that don't support WebSockets...which is useful, because, as I understand it, WebSockets aren't supported by most phones)
This isn't my area of expertise though, but it may be worth researching.
I will make a website where users log in to see the site's info organized in a way which is specific to each user, depending on the settings which they can set/save while logged in. But they won't be adding content or uploading anything. So I guess, it won't be a lot of data - just a couple lines of text for each user.
So, to start out, I'd like to use something free to store that user data. Dropbox or Google docs, my own compter.... I dont know.
And then later, when I get enough users to make the investment worthwhile, pay for a more legitimate solution.
My question is, in the meantime, what is the best way to store that user data? Should I use javascript and Google docs API to read/write to a spreadsheet?
What is going to be most convenient when my user base has grown enough and it comes time to move all that over to a larger system?
And are there any other concerns I should be thinking about?
Look into using a lightweight DBMS like MySQL. If you want, you can serve it locally using your computer, but don't expect it to handle a lot of traffic. It'd be better to find an old computer and use that as a server.
What is your hosting solution? Many include free mySQL databases which should be enough.
I would suggest using sqlite3 or something for a database setup. They can be very small files and easily manageable. In the long-run sqlite3 isn't a great choice. You would want to move to a heftier database assuming you rake in a lot of users.