Announcing FTGS: The Full Thrust Game Server
September 17, 2008 § Leave a comment
This is the official kick-off the “FTGS” project (prounounced “fatigues”), an effort to build an online Game Server for the Full Thrust Space Naval Wargame. It is inspired by (though not directly derived from) the FTJava Play-By-eMail client. FTGS will be developed via an open process, using a public git Mercurial repository and the ftjava-test mailing list (subscribe). Eventually the complete system will be hosted on its own domain, e.g. “fullthrust.ws“.
Space Naval Wargame Project: Full Thrust
September 12, 2008 § 1 Comment
I’ve been thinking for a while about building a simple wargame as a way to try out various new technologies I’m experimenting with. A gamer friend of mine recently told me about Full Thrust, which seems like an ideal candidate. My initial thought is to implement a RESTful back-end using Google App Engine (since it is hosted for free), and perhaps attempt simple front ends in SproutCore, Shoes, HotCocoa, and the iPhone SDK.
No promises, but watch this blog (and the git repository Assembla developer portal) for future efforts. And let me know if you’d like to help!
Rohit’s SynOA takes the “Sin” out of SOA
September 24, 2007 § 1 Comment
Many years ago, my buddy Rohit Khare introduced me to a guy named Roy Fielding, and tried to explain how this whole web services thing was going in completely the wrong direction. To be honest, I didn’t understand what the big deal was, particularly since I wasn’t really working with those technologies. Alas, neither did the rest of the industry which was rushing headlong into what become Service-Oriented Architectures.
Fast forward to 2006, when I finally understood (and became enamored of) Roy’s RESTful architectures (which I helped pitch to DHH for Rails 1.2). The problem now was figuring out how to help people understand REST in terms of a specific implementation, rather than Roy’s highly abstract architecture. Several of us have experimented with using the excellent Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) as both a model and foundation for building a RESTful alternative to traditional web services, but that was as far as we went.
Rohit (as usual) went one step further by coining (and describing) the term Syndication-oriented architecture at the Gartner Financial Service Technology Summit. The key idea (IMHO) is to use the additional constraints of REST in general, and APP in particular, to minimize variance and thus enable greater interoperability. His initial paper was published by KnowNow on August 27, 2007, but only noticed by a few folks like Bruce MacVarish. The meme didn’t really gather steam until Rohit was interviewed by Jon Udell. That was in turn blogged in Kurt Cagle’s O’ReillyNet column (among others), and as of September 24th I count over 10,000 Google hits for “SynOA syndication.”
I think SynOA could well turn out to be the “tipping point” for both REST and Syndication; though obviously we still have a long way to go…
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