What is involved with writing a lobby server?
- by Kira
So I'm writing a Chess matchmaking system based on a Lobby view with gaming rooms, general chat etc. So far I have a working prototype but I have big doubts regarding some things I did with the server. Writing a gaming lobby server is a new programming experience to me and so I don't have a clear nor precise programming model for it. I also couldn't find a paper that describes how it should work. I ordered "Java Network Programming 3rd edition" from Amazon and still waiting for shipment, hopefully I'll find some useful examples/information in this book.
Meanwhile, I'd like to gather your opinions and see how you would handle some things so I can learn how to write a server correctly. Here are a few questions off the top of my head: (may be more will come)
First, let's define what a server does. It's primary functionality is to hold TCP connections with clients, listen to the events they generate and dispatch them to the other players. But is there more to it than that?
Should I use one thread per client? If so, 300 clients = 300 threads. Isn't that too much? What hardware is needed to support that? And how much bandwidth does a lobby consume then approx?
What kind of data structure should be used to hold the clients' sockets? How do you protect it from concurrent modification (eg. a player enters or exists the lobby) when iterating through it to dispatch an event without hurting throughput? Is ConcurrentHashMap the correct answer here, or are there some techniques I should know?
When a user enters the lobby, what mechanism would you use to transfer the state of the lobby to him? And while this is happening, where do the other events bubble up?
Screenshot : http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/695/sansrewyh.png/
