In-Reply-To=65BAE9EEDADD409CA83C32F2E54A0CB9%40Podcaster sorry, folks: i didn't see this message, and it's taken me ten months of obscure searches to find it.
> > I'm about to start programming a game in Python. The game will > > be a web-based board game with a social aspect, something like > > http://www.chesspark.com. I want the game to run in both browsers > > and as a desktop client. and presumably you don't want to duplicate effort. ergo, pyjamas is a good choice. actually... it's your _only_ python choice if you don't want to burden the users. your other choices are: adobe AIR, silverlight, and, more recently, appcelerator. appcelerator is interesting: you get to run IronPython because appcelerator's "titanium" is actually a silverlight / browser plugin that gives IronPython apps access to the DOM model of the browser. > > Therefore I'm wondering what python-based > > technologies I need. I know that Javascript/AJAX is necessary for > > the browser part so I have decided on the following: > > > > 1. Pyjamas - (for the AJAX browser stuff) > > > > 2. Pyjamas-desktop - (for the desktop client) pyjamas-desktop now has XULrunner and MSHTML as back-end engines. the MSHTML one is particularly strategically significant, as the only real requirements are, instead of a whopping 30mb bundle including gtk, cairo, xulrunner, pygtk, pycairo, pygobject _and_ not to mention python itself, you can just install... python-comtypes (which is a 200k download). for the POSIX-compliant systems, such as debian, there's "apt-get install hulahop", and you get python-xpcom, xulrunner and all other dependencies pulled in "for free". > > 3. Web2py (or djanjo, or django+pinax) - for the website on which the game will run and for database access and social part - login, chat, members, profiles, game history, etc.) > > > > 4. Twisted - for the networking and chat functionality. > > > > 5. Pygame - for most of the game stuff, sprites, inages, etc. (Actually I > > don't know if Pygame is necessary for a board-type game.) no, it's not. i wrote a board-type game "meta-engine" which involved moving of pyjamas.ui.Image "tokens" around a pyjamas.ui.AbsolutePanel and it was incredibly simple and it actually worked. i went to a lot of trouble to use the django server and AJAX (actually JSONRPC) to communicate "moving" of tokens. as one user moved a token, the fact that it had "moved" would be noted in a database table (id, game_session_id, user_id, token_id) of course obviously excluding the user who had moved it. a continuous poll by a user of the database would empty the table of "moved" notifications for that user, and return a list of new position info for the tokens that needed to be moved. update speed turned out to be about 1-2 frames per second: perfectly adequate for a board game. oh: for "Go", due to the number of tokens, however, i found that over 700 tokens resulted in _considerably_ slow Firefox 2 initialisation times, which turns out to be a known bug in Firefox 2. adding over 256 absolute-positioned items to a div element using DOM manipulation is *SEVERELY* cpu-intensive: beyond some sort of fixed limit, adding elements turns from O(N) to O(N^2). for full information on the issue, courtesy of john gunther, and a solution, see: http://pyjamas.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pyjamas/trunk/library/pyjamas/chart/GChartWidgets.py?view=log i also added "spectators" which were simply "users with no rights to move tokens". they got their own "chat" channel so as not to interfere with the players. twisted users are probably screaming loudly at the "polling" technique especially one that hammers a database so heavily, but hey, you can't have everything :) if anyone knows of any better event-driven methods including example code that can be queried with JSONRPC i'm _really_ interested to hear about it. think in terms of "don't respond to the JSONRPC request unless either 15 seconds has passed, or there are some events which have been triggered by other users". yes i fully understand the complexities involved and that one possible implementation is a single-process asynchronous JSONRPC HTTP service, which is _nasty_ as hell: i'm interested to hear if there's anything better. > > My understanding of the above technologies is still limited and I'm not > > sure if I need all of these because some functionality may be overlapped. > > e.g. I don't know where Pyjamas leaves off and where web2py/danjo/pinax > > begins. > > > > Can someone please give me some advice? > > That's a fine laundry list of frameworks, but i believe getting all of > them to cooperate would be practically impossible. (Note: a framework > is a library that's grown to the point where it thinks it owns your > whole program. Getting multiple frameworks to play nicely together is > usually hard. There are rare exceptions, like the beautiful integration > between Twisted and PyGTK, but they're rare.) the integration point of choice between pyjamas and frameworks is JSONRPC, simply because it was the first one that was implemented, and it's turned out to be incredibly practical. examination of the wiki http://code.google.com/p/pyjamas/wiki shows over 90% of the wiki pages are "how to use pyjamas with <insert framework>". including two or three methods for twisted, and two or more with django. > I know that Django and pygame and Twisted are useful, mature, documented > frameworks that actually get used in production by people other than > their authors. I don't know about Pyjamas. http://pyjs.org/FAQ.html "i'm a bit underwhelmed by the apparent lack of documentation": says "go back to main site, http://pyjs.org, see Documentation section" which has these: http://pyjs.org/api http://pyjs.org/book/output/Bookreader.html still relevant, because the U.I API hasn't really changed: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation for best results, read: http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/javadoc/1.6/index.html specifically the U.I "package": http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/javadoc/1.6/com/google/gwt/user/client/ui/package-summary.html > If putting 100% Python in one end and getting Ajax out the other is > really important to you, then you need Pyjamas to work. (Or wait for > PyPy and its JavaScript backend to mature from experimental research > code to production-quality stuff.) that's not going to happen. the pypy javascript back-end has been abandoned. it's still available in a branch, but you are not going to get anywhere with it. plus, due to the fact that the sole and exclusive focus of the pypy javascript back-end is to be totally 100% python interoperable, to the absolute exclusion of all else (e.g. speed), even if you got it going, you'd find that apps ran like treacle. then, if you tried to debug the app, you'd find that it was near-impossible, because the code is near-pure-assembler-like, having gone through rpython, first. being utterly divorced from its original python, you are entirely at the mercy of the pypy developers for bug-fixes aaand... they've abandoned it. bottom line: forget pypy. > So my advice is to write a simple > tic-tac-toe game in Pyjamas, and find out. or a lightout game. http://pyjs.org/examples/lightout/output/lightout.html or a sudoku game. http://lkcl.net/sudoku/output/Sudoku.html (in each case, full source code is 1 level below) of course, these are single-user games. what you should be slightly surprised by is the fact that the source code of each app is so damn small. the sudoku one, it hardly looks like there's any actual "pyjamas" code in it at all. you have to _really_ peer very hard at the code, looking for clues such as "ListBox", "Grid", "HTML" and "HorizontalPanel" in order to discern the bits that just get on with serving up a sudoku game and the bits which "glorify pyjamas" so to speak. "oh look, there's a button. i wonder if it calls this funny method named 'onClick' if the button gets clicked. why yes, what a surprise, it does!" anyway this is a bit long, i'll stop now :) l. _______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
