Friday, November 2, 2012
CityVille 2 is Live!
For those of you that are curious of what I've been working on over the past year, you can now go check it out at http://apps.facebook.com/cityville-two
This is a game that encompasses some of the most advanced internet technology available today. From cloud computing to a 3D graphics game that runs in your browser (and doesn't require any special installation), cool game simulations to help make the game fun, incredibly fast load times for the impatient, and much much more. It's impressive to see software systems this complex have the ability to reach over millions of players every day.
I worked on all aspects of this game from start to finish with about 50 other PMs/producers/artists/game designers & engineers. My role as a software architect for this product involved building the animation system, particle system, some small pieces of the 3D Engine in it's early stages, integration with pretty much every external web service that the game uses like: Facebook open graph, Payments systems, zCloud infrastructure, all client/server interactions, storage of game state, and I helped drive adoption of the first Zynga game to fully utilize the new ZyngaAPI which is starting to become available to 3rd party developers at http://developers.zynga.com.
While I don't expect this sort of game is for everyone, go check it out and help support me and the soon to be biggest game on the internet.
Let's Play!
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
GWT-Ext and Grails just works!
After about a year of experimenting with web frameworks I think I've finally found something that works well...
Using GWT as a client framework is so helpful because you don't need to worry about HTML, javascript, CSS and the zillion frameworks that wraps these technologies.
Using Grails as a server framework is helpful because it's a DSL (groovy) which provides many additions to the Java JDK, closures, convention over configuration, dynamic finders, and many more useful features that make you productive.
If you use just plain GWT then you will need to know a little something about CSS if you want your webapp to look good, but I didn't want to spend time messing with that because I knew there is already tons of options out there that make your entire widget suite look good. That is when I found the javascript library Ext and the GWT-Ext project which wraps the Ext javascript library so that you can easily use it in the GWT framework. This framework is AWESOME! It looks good, the framework is easy to learn and extend, and you get tons of functionality right out of the box.
Now, I still think using Flex/Flash based clients with Grails or Rails(JRuby) servers are probably just as good since they follow the same concepts as my example application, but I'm not sure how easily Flex applications can be debugged. It probably works pretty well though given the Flex Builder IDE that Adobe has developed.
Anyways, check out my sample GWT-Ext+Grails application here (http://www.brentryan.com/client) <-- Doesn't work sometimes because my IP address changes and too lazy to setup dynamic DNS. This application has complete separation between the client and server because the client makes RESTful like Http request to the grails back end and the grails server app returns JSON responses when needed. In this example I'm also generating charts using JFreeChart from the grails backend and displaying them in the GWT client.
Example application login/password
username: admin
password: admin
Email if you have any questions brent.ryan@gmail.com
Source code for this example can be found here
Pre-built client and server war files can be downloaded:
Download --> client
Download --> server
Update: GWT-Ext 2.0 was released and requires much of these api's to be updated. Check out the live demo. I think it's very impressive.
Using GWT as a client framework is so helpful because you don't need to worry about HTML, javascript, CSS and the zillion frameworks that wraps these technologies.
Using Grails as a server framework is helpful because it's a DSL (groovy) which provides many additions to the Java JDK, closures, convention over configuration, dynamic finders, and many more useful features that make you productive.
If you use just plain GWT then you will need to know a little something about CSS if you want your webapp to look good, but I didn't want to spend time messing with that because I knew there is already tons of options out there that make your entire widget suite look good. That is when I found the javascript library Ext and the GWT-Ext project which wraps the Ext javascript library so that you can easily use it in the GWT framework. This framework is AWESOME! It looks good, the framework is easy to learn and extend, and you get tons of functionality right out of the box.
Now, I still think using Flex/Flash based clients with Grails or Rails(JRuby) servers are probably just as good since they follow the same concepts as my example application, but I'm not sure how easily Flex applications can be debugged. It probably works pretty well though given the Flex Builder IDE that Adobe has developed.
Anyways, check out my sample GWT-Ext+Grails application here (http://www.brentryan.com/client) <-- Doesn't work sometimes because my IP address changes and too lazy to setup dynamic DNS. This application has complete separation between the client and server because the client makes RESTful like Http request to the grails back end and the grails server app returns JSON responses when needed. In this example I'm also generating charts using JFreeChart from the grails backend and displaying them in the GWT client.
Example application login/password
username: admin
password: admin
Email if you have any questions brent.ryan@gmail.com
Source code for this example can be found here
Pre-built client and server war files can be downloaded:
Download --> client
Download --> server
Update: GWT-Ext 2.0 was released and requires much of these api's to be updated. Check out the live demo. I think it's very impressive.
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