在Java中为客户端-服务器套接字通信实现协议

Question

I'm developing a multi-player turn based game for Android - a poker game. I'm almost finished with the clinet game-play. Now I need to implement the multi-player thing.

I thought about using Web Services but I have no experience with that and I undertsand that socket-communication is faster.

I have some experience with writing socket-communication in Java: Using ObjectOutputStream and ObjectInputStream to exchange data (game-states and turn actions in this case).

But I have a concern with this approach - the server-side is platform-dependent. If I want to have an iPhone developer create the app for iPhone, he could not do this because the server expects Java code. Am I right?

And another question please: Can I implement normal-socket communication and then later easily change it to secure-socket communication? It's just that I need to learn how to use SSL and I don't want to go into it right now.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is an old question but relevant for me and hopefully others so here goes. I'm currently working on a project that involves multiple computers on different platforms using Java sockets. I'm using sockets because eventually I can use any language as long as I adhere to the protocol I wrote. I too have some predefined integer constants that control what data is expected in what order. For example, before I start some particular function, I send a particular integer, followed by the expected data. Anything that doesn't come in in the expected order results in an error. So as long as the language/runtime offers the ability to write integers and strings over a TCP socket, it should work. I think that covers the vast majority of major programming languages.

As for SSL sockets, I'm doing that also :) I started out using non-SSL sockets and then refactored to make it work with SSL sockets. I was surprised at how easy it is. I would recommend this git repo for sample code: https://github.com/jawi/ssl-socket-demo .

Eventually I plan to have the user who uses my app generate the key store and self-signed certificate locally when they first run the app as part of its initial setup. As long as they import that same key store into the app on every other node that they use in their network, they'll be able to talk to each other. This will ensure that the communication is encrypted in a way that is unique to their network. Of course this will require that they keep the key store file securely stored in their local file systems :)