[Ftr, I got Rocco's approval before sending this. He agreed that y'all might want to see some POE in action. It's one part shameless self-promotion, one part informational, and one part gratitude]
We've just launched our POE-based network game: The Glass Bead Network. It's been 5+ years in the making (working nights and weekends can only get you so far, so fast). The website is http://www.glassbead.net/ (signup and play is free, and we have a tournament this Saturday--come play or just come watch if you like. I'm user 'scott' in the game). POE is our messaging engine between the Flash-based web game clients. Each Flash client makes a TCP connection to one of our POE servers. The POE servers relay chat messages and game events between users on the same server or users connected to other servers (the users themselves have no knowledge of the network topology). We use PoCo::Server::TCP and PoCo::Client::TCP for all of the connection management. Each Server has a Client instance to each of the other servers for inter-server message relaying; having multiple servers able to relay communications like this lets us scale pretty far on cheap hardware (we're bootstrapping this, so cheap is good). It was originally based almost entirely off of one of the POE cookbook examples (Chat_Server); it's current size is about 8k lines (K&R style function defs, no comments or blank lines). The game uses the following other technologies: Flash/ActionScript for the game client, XML for message transport, Apache web server for the website, MySQL for the game state database and Berkeley DB XML for the game play and bead (playing pieces) database. We run FreeBSD 6 for our server OS, but the main POE server runs flawlessly on other systems we've tried. I wanted to thank everyone on the list who has asked good questions and the fine folks who have answered them over the years. The list archives and Cookbook section has been *immensely* valuable in helping me get my head POE-ified. Wish us luck! (and send me any feedback if you like) Scott -- Scott Wiersdorf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
