Air Ace Update Server + Launcher

~2 years ago I had a student do a project with/for me. I was in need of a combined launcher+updater client, and we worked together on that 2-3 month. He wrote a project, got good grades and everyone was happy. The code wasnt 110% solid and finished, but it was good none the less.

Well - as things happen, the code never really got used and it went into my SVN "for later".

Since we are approaching alpha for Air Ace very fast, it was time to pull out this old stuff and brush it up. Yesterday I finally got the last pieces running again - and what better excuse but to write a blog and post some screenies :-)

The requirements for the system were (from top of my mind)

Client:
* "platform independent"
* C++
* display news
* update the game
* launch the game

The update process had to be fairly robust and secure. Encryption, CRC checks and rollback on any failure

For the client side we decided to use wxWindows and C++, so it would be easy to get it running on multiple platforms. The client talks to several webservices on the server to fetch news, check for updates, grabbing updates etc.

Server:
* "platform independent"
* J2EE
* support for unlimited games from same server
* webclient for uploading updates/writing news/configuration etc

All my backend stuff is coded in Java (Java2 Enterprise Edition), as its (in my mind) the best scalable language to use for server side. I've released several boxed non-game domain products with it and it just runs!. Having application servers like JBoss makes it _very_ easy to support clustering, sessions, database independence, transactions and webservices with minimal code.

The idea was an architecture like this:



The administrative client was easily made as a web client included in the application server, so thats what we ended up with.

Various screenshots:

Boring ones first - the running server:


Not much to see :-)

The administrative webclient (still under graphical development - but fully working):



And lastly the progression from the "student art" client to the almost done Air Ace layout. Still to be done is the transparent wxHTML widget





and finally a fully connected client up against the backend