[ANN] Webbrowser game made with GWT 2.0: lacesfirst.com

[Fushion]

I started playing around with GWT since version 1.3 just fooling
around with the code and trying out some various things.
One thing I did was starting to develop a browser game, so I could see
how things worked out in a real application instead of just mocking up
some fancy gadgets.

Well, one thing led to another and now it is starting to look like an
actual application.
You can find it on http://lacesfirst.com

It is an online football manager game where you can manage a football
team.
You can train players, hire employees, change formations and tactics,
sell/buy players, change the lineup of your team, upgrade your stadium/
shops etc.
The games are simulated every day at specified times and take into
account the tactics and linup of your team (and the opponents' team).
The teams and players are all fictional and randomly generated, as
there is no way I want to get into licencing troubles with the NFL
ofcourse.

One thing to notice is that the entire game (client and server code)
is made of 100% Java (Using EJB3on server side).
This made it possible to have just one servlet containing about 40
lines of code that just calls a SessionBean on the EJB server.
Also the code of the data model is used in both client and server
side, so no extra DTO objects were needed.
All this makes the code very slim and manageble.
It is not exactly a UI that you would find in a typical GWT
application though...

The game is still in beta as there are many things that can be made
better, but it is playable anyway.
Have fun!

Greetz,

Menno.

[Nian Zhang]

When shall i have a try to play the game, too emergy.

[mariyan nenchev]

Nice.
How much time the game took to be designed and developed?

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[Fushion]

Well, I started about 2 years ago, just a few hours a month trying out
various GWT things and gradually upgrading to newer GWT versions (1.3
- 1.4 - 1.5 - 1.6 - 1.7 - 2.0).

Upgrading was always easy as I found out. The only hard part was
getting Jetty to communicate with my JBoss application server in
developmode, but that seems to work just fine now.
Debugging is a lot easier now that OOPHM is implemented in 2.0. I
would REALLY encourage people to start using it as it makes developing/
debugging in various browser simulatious a no brainer and saves a lot
of time! I only have to start the development-mode once a day and
start 4 browsers to connect to it.

Most time is spend on CSS styling, as that is still the main problem
when developing for web browsers today.
The page is still in quirks mode (transitional html) as I found out
that it gives me the most consistent UI on all browsers I tested on
(IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari).
One of the future improvements will be to set the page in standards
mode (html or xhtml), but my first impression on that is that IE7 is
very buggy in that area, especially when trying to do a centered
layout. I hope MS will give IE7 a firm kick out of the browser
world... ;-)

The game still uses a lot of pre 2.0 options, but this will be
upgraded over the next weeks (e.g. *LayoutPanels, more UiBinding and
ClientResource integration ).

The GWT things that you are able to see in the game include:
- GlassPanels (in various ways)
- Timers
- RunAsync
- Popups
- History management
- GWT RPC (no deRPC yet...)
- Paging tables
- ImageBundles (still pre 2.0)
- MenuBar

If I had all the tools and ideas I used in the game at the beginning
of development, I estimate that it would have taken me 2-3 months full
time to develop it (client AND server code, don't underestimate your
server coding....)

Menno.

On 7 jan, 11:28, mariyan nenchev <nenchev.mari...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nice.
> How much time the game took to be designed and developed?
>

> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:40 AM, Fushion <menno.van.gange...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > I started playing around with GWT since version 1.3 just fooling
> > around with the code and trying out some various things.
> > One thing I did was starting to develop a browser game, so I could see
> > how things worked out in a real application instead of just mocking up
> > some fancy gadgets.
>
> > Well, one thing led to another and now it is starting to look like an
> > actual application.

> > You can find it onhttp://lacesfirst.com

> > google-web-tool...@googlegroups.com<google-web-toolkit%2Bunsubs cr...@googlegroups.com>

[mariyan nenchev]

Could you give us small step by step guide how to make gwt 2.0 development mode working with gwt RPC and JBoss ejb beans? I never got it to work.

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[Fushion]

Assuming a setup with Eclipse, I did the following:

* Create file /src/jndi.properties:
============================
java.naming.factory.initial=org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContextFactory
java.naming.factory.url.pkgs=org.jboss.naming:org.jnp.interfaces
java.naming.provider.url=<dns.or.ip.of.j2ee.server>
============================

* Create file /war/WEB-INF/jetty-web.xml:
============================
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN"
"http://jetty.mortbay.org/configure.dtd">

<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
<Set name="systemClasses">
<Array type="java.lang.String">
<Item>java.</Item>
<Item>javax.servlet.</Item>
<Item>javax.xml.</Item>
<Item>org.mortbay.</Item>
<Item>org.xml.</Item>
<Item>org.w3c.</Item>
<Item>org.apache.commons.logging.</Item>
<Item>org.apache.log4j.</Item>
<Item>org.slf4j.</Item>
</Array>
</Set>

<Set name="serverClasses">
<Array type="java.lang.String">
<Item>org.mortbay.jetty.</Item>
<Item>org.mortbay.start.</Item>
<Item>org.mortbay.stop.</Item>
</Array>
</Set>
</Configure>
============================

Create a servlet which will forward all requests to a SessionBean on
the JBoss Server:
============================
public class RemoteEJBProxyServlet extends RemoteServiceServlet {

protected InitialContext ctx;

@Override
public void init() throws ServletException {

super.init();

try {
this.ctx = new InitialContext();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.err.println(e.getMessage());
throw new ServletException("Could not create InitialContext", e);
}
}

@Override
public String processCall(String payload) throws
SerializationException {
try {
// Get the session bean
Object bean = ctx.lookup("<The JNDI name of your SessionBean>");

// Decode the request and test if it is legal
RPCRequest rpcRequest = RPC.decodeRequest(payload, bean.getClass(),
this);

// Invoke the requested method on the bean and return the encoded
(=RPC serialized) result
return invokeAndEncodeResponse(bean, rpcRequest,
rpcRequest.getSerializationPolicy());

} catch (NamingException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
return RPC.encodeResponseForFailure(null, new Exception
(ex.getMessage()));

} catch (IncompatibleRemoteServiceException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
return RPC.encodeResponseForFailure(null, ex);
}

}

private String invokeAndEncodeResponse(Object target, RPCRequest
rpcRequest, SerializationPolicy serializationPolicy) throws
SerializationException {

String responsePayload;

Method method = rpcRequest.getMethod();
Object[] args = rpcRequest.getParameters();

try {
Object result = method.invoke(target, args);
responsePayload = RPC.encodeResponseForSuccess(method, result,
serializationPolicy);
} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
throw new SecurityException(e);
} catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
throw new SecurityException(e);
} catch (InvocationTargetException e) {
Throwable cause = e.getCause();
responsePayload = RPC.encodeResponseForFailure(method, cause,
serializationPolicy);
}

return responsePayload;
}
}

============================

Also make sure that the J2EE Server libraries are included in the
Eclipse Run Configuration of your GWT Development Mode.
These are needed by Jetty to connect to the J2EE Server.
In the case of JBOSS these are all of the JAR files in "<JBOSS-DIR>/
client" and "<JBOSS-DIR>/common/lib".

Greetz,

Menno.

On 7 jan, 17:31, mariyan nenchev <nenchev.mari...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Could you give us small step by step guide how to make gwt 2.0 development
> mode working with gwt RPC and JBoss ejb beans? I never got it to work.

> > > > google-web-tool...@googlegroups.com<google-web-toolkit%2Bunsubs cr...@googlegroups.com><google-web-toolkit%2Bunsubs

[Fushion]

Ohh, I almost forgot... your SessionBean has to implement your GWT
RemoteService interface (not the Async one!) ofcourse..

[mariyan nenchev]

could you setup some example pls

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