PHP Server side

Networking & Multiplayer
#1

Hi all, long time reader, first time poster.

I’ve been programming in Java for a little while now (as an amateur) and i’m now making a foray into writing some 2D games. My first prototype is coming along nicely, but I have a couple of questions about server side.

I’ve read some topics on here that confirm PHP can be used as a viable server side in certain circumstances. To begin with I want to keep things fairly simple and for my first prototype I just want to keep high scores server side so they are accessible to anyone who plays the game. I have some experience of PHP so it would be good to ‘go with what you know’ to get used to things.

Later on I want to explore things where state is saved when placing objects, similar to games with mechanics like FarmVille where you place objects and then come back later.

I’ve been trying to google about the best way to go about this, but finding out the nuts and bolts of the way to go about this on google seems to not be that easy.

My own thought would be to bundle up the data into XML and then buffer stream it to the PHP script to parse and store in MySQL and vice versa back to the client. Would this be a viable way to do it or am I missing a trick here? (most likely!)

#2

As much as I loathe PHP personally, it’s certainly viable if you’re comfortable with it. For something as infrequent as a high scores list, using XML as a transport and a database for a store looks perfectly sound. Just get that done and don’t dwell on it, it’s something you can easily change later on anyway.

For fast interaction in real time, PHP can start having issues, since even with bytecode caching and whatnot, it still has to reinitialize an interpreter on every single request. If your machine can handle that traffic, then you’ll still probably want to use a lighter transport that works well with both java and php, such as Thrift.