Browser based multiplayer game

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Im looking to make a browserbased multiplayer game. How should i approach this?

I was thinking of making applets run on the clients and then have a serverside program to handle the game mechanics and the communication. I want to store client information and stats serverside too.

Is the serverside server a so-called servlet? - Can you reference somewhere that describes the communication between applet and servlet?

Another issue is that i will be using multiple images in the game, can i leave those on the server to be fetched when needed, or are they forced into the applet the client downloads?

Can you suggest any other solutions than my proposed? It is vital that the program is solely run from a browser as i want it to be available from anywhere.

Dont worry about the programming details for now. Ill look those up, but i need to know what mechanics ill be needing to read up on.

Thanks in advance.

#2

If you are looking to make a brower based game without intricate graphics, you can simply use JSP and servlets (and a supporting server ala Tomcat or JBoss).
JSP is kinda like PHP.

#3

one of the hurdles i have identified is how to alert the other player that an action is required of him.

I thoght about autorefresh (polling) of the page, but that would make it flicker and not look nice, then i thought of the partial rendering that asp.net supports, but that also has the flicker, albeit in a smaller area. When i load pictures on the page the refresh would make the autorefresh even more loathesome.

I have done some testing in asp.net, i assume its the same concept as jsp?

I gather this problem would be remedied by using servlets?

#4

As I have no idea about ASP I cannot comment about this.

Don’t applets also support connections to the origin (the server they were downloaded from)? IIRC it had been mentioned here somewhere.
But IIRC it would only work with a ‘newer’ Java version.

@Servlet:
Dunno how you plan on using them.

One thing you could always do is to partition off a part of the page (either by frame or some other tech) that polls the ‘input required’ info.
Then only that portion will continuously get updated.
But I totally suck at HTML, so you might want to ask a pro.