Talking to the Server

Abstract

After reading the previous chapter, you are ready to create a game server and provide a decent infrastructure around it with templates, error handling, and logging. To build a real multiplayer application, however, a server is not enough. The second essential part of the networking architecture is the client. The goal of this chapter is to provide a good level of knowledge of networking from the client’s perspective. In order to do that, we will learn the following:

• How to load the data from the server without having to reload a web page

• A newer version of the XMLHttpRequest object called XHR Level 2

• How to load binary data from the server and parse it on the client side

• The limitations of mobile devices

• A few things about reverse Ajax and the options available to implement real-time client-server communication

• The definition of a transport and the types of trade-ofts involved when a developer chooses a transport for his game