The Union Platform (tm) - Question about the Union Platform -

Question about the Union Platform

Added by Kalani Bright 1008 days ago

I feel silly asking this question to you guys because I know this platform is the bomb because of whoʻs working on it.
I just found out about it and Iʻm just doing the first app now. Just have some questions.

My question is how does Union compare to SmartFoxServer? What are the advantages and how do the architectures compare?
What cool features do you have planned?

Also it mentioned black-boxing persistence. Iʻm a Flash/Flex Developer. Not really a Java or Server guy but have been trying to learn Java so I could do a BlazeDS Spring, and Hibernate/mySQL type of thing so I could to do all the fancy things I wanted to do without a lot of extra code. I just want to do something like user.save(); in Flash and have it stored on the server in a database.

I want to figure out what exactly union server is like. I will try to delve in to the modules to see what that is like. My first application will be a multi-player game-show like trivia game with a Flash front end. Everything timed so all users have the same experience. Maybe up to 8 in a game with several games going on at the same time. Front end in Flash/Flex. However I would later like to provide a Unity3D front-end in both Desktop and iPhone flavors. I guess being in XML I would be able to write a front end in Unity3D.

Iʻm just mentioning these things because you might bring up an idea or feature which could save me a lot of time or direct me in a path to get where I want to go.

Because of all the questions, media, video, and other elements which would be involved Iʻm curious about two things

- what about things like Red5 are you guys going to include something like that the way SmartFoxServer did?
- Also Iʻm also thinking that when admin users go into log in I would like to be able to call methods on the server straight from flash. Does the union server simplify server/object/database persistence for custom objects or is it just related to things that are part of the "union suite". Lets say I want to permanently store a collection of objects for a user.

Make that three.
- How many users can union server support for a given app (you pick) .. say on a Media Temple site. Do you guys know? Any range? Lets say I dont do any video or load it as a .flv from a thirdparty site and the load is only loading in questions and sending status messages about the users...infinity? :)

Iʻm sure things will make more sense once I play around. Look forward to it. Thanks.

Thanks a lot guys,

Kalani

Replies

RE: Question about the Union Platform - Added by derek clayton 999 days ago

Hi Kalani,

I'm most excited about our API and the Reactor client. For example, to create and join a Union room with Reactor you simply do this:

chatRoom = connection.getRoomManager().createRoom("chatRoom");

chatRoom.join();

It's easy to understand and is very much like coding synchronously on a local system. On the server I really like our event based architecture. You can listen to as many or as few events as you like and can map those events to actual java methods rather than having to implement a listener with a lot of methods you don't want to use or having a single method with one big switch statement. It just makes things intuitive when writing server modules...i.e. when X happens do Y.

Our server uses a fixed internal messaging format but all communications pass through an adapter layer which would allow any kind of external protocol to be used. Right now in alpha we support the UPC protocol in XML format over a persistent IO or NIO socket. We have plans for more and may allow people to write their own adapters and plug them in.

Our persistence will have a default interface much like you described where objects can be actively or passively persisted. The default implementation will be hibernate based (a project I am a big fan of). As with our messaging API we will create an API that makes persistence intuitive to work with. You won't ever have to code anything monstrous like .getDAOFactory().getDAO().saveEntity(user).

We have no immediate plans to include any video or audio streaming features in Union. Our current focus is multiuser data.

We haven't released performance testing yet, but expect figures in the thousands or tens of thousands, depending on the application's data transfer, the network capacity, and the cpu/ram capacity.

Please let us know about any feedback you have while writing your trivia app!

Derek