Site to play durak online

Durak is a card game very popular in Eastern Europe. I like this card game, therefore i decided to build a site in which one could play Durak online against other people. It was surprising that such popular game did not have good website to play it online, well there were some, but they was ugly, hardly playable and poor. So my goal was to build better site. This was challenging task, but I started to plan it thoroughly. First prototype of it emerged in 2008. I have built it using cakephp and ajax. It neither was easy to play nor good looking. But it was at least playable. By having this prototype version, I was able to analyze in details main aspects of building web site including both usability and technical inplementation. And this was the very first step of building The best Durak card game online website.

First of all i found that i have very limited resources. Time was limited, because, I could work on the project on my spare time only. And unfortunately i do not have much spare time. So I decided to go with only essential features, to use good frameworks and tools and do not try to reinvent a bycycle.

The second limited resource was servers. Durak is interactive game, so clients to wery much queries to the server, so server should be capable to process all these requests. Also server had to host a website itself.

Given those two limitations I designed an application architecture, that was meant to impose rapid development and to be able to be ran on cheap servers. My decission was to move as much logic as is possible to the client. And client software to be coded in javascript using jQuery. Another decission vas to separate website server from the server in which all the interactions in between players happening. I decided to make website itself in Symfony2 web application framework to accelerate the development and to host a website in a cheap PHP web hosting. And to use another Game Server which I built on Google Appengine platform using python language. It was easy to start with but it was far not cheap. But developing with Python is very fast. However later I had to escape AppEngine due to its increasing pricing, so I ported the Game Server from Python to good old java servlets, that could be deployed at every host that supports WAR application hosting. The porting took only couple of days, and I called my new server software Uncloud, because I was upset by AppEngine cloud technology pricing and hosted it in JVMHost (Yes, this is referal link, but please note that I am very content by this service, so I would really reccomend it for everyone). But I think to develop it in Python at first then to port it to Java can be good idea sometimes, as it was in my case. The truth is: developing in python is fast. But java servlets have one important feature - the application state can be saved without using any database or other external storing mechanisms, ]I could all the player and game states store just to Application context, instead using any permanent persistence, so the Uncloud server got even faster.

So, we now have some sort of service oriented system model, and a natural question to arrise here would be "How do these components interact to each other?". See this picture:

This is how services interact when user enters the game.

Client makes request to the Website, asking to join the game.
Website communicates to Uncloud, ant tells Uncloud to accept requests from the Client.
Website responds to client with credentials, required to connect to Uncloud
Client makes JSONP request to Uncloud not independently from Website, up from this time, client only communicates dirrectly to Uncloud.
Uncloud responds to Client.

Steps 4-5 are repeated as long as player stays in the game. Three components could be found, that is Client Software, Website server and Uncloud server.

This architecture well balanced load between servers and client. Website is only responsible For serving pages and user authentification. Game interactions are shared between Uncloud and Client Software. Uncloud returns only simple JSON, so all html rendering is done on Client Software. Hosting is relatively cheap, and is sufficient for game to run nice and smoothly.

How does it all look you might wonder? See this video or visit durak24.com website.

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