Tag Archives: html5

Adobe Flash will be retired at the end of 2020

As announced a few years ago, Adobe has been working on the gradual retirement of the Flash technology from the web in favor of open standards such as HTML5, WebGL etc.

Officially December 31st. 2020 will be the last day for the Flash platform, after which it will be removed from the Adobe website. This means it won’t be available for download any more, nor there will be any form of support or updates from Adobe.

How does this impact SmartFoxServer and its users? Let’s find out.

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Developing custom AdminTool modules

With the release of SmartFoxServer 2X v2.16 and the final HTML5 version of its Administration Tool, we decided to introduce a long-awaited feature: support for custom administration modules.

In this article we will provide a brief introduction on the subject and a walkthrough of the development and integration workflow of the modules.

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The new AdminTool (beta) is available

With the progressive retirement of the Flash platform we started researching how to port our SmartFoxServer 2X Admin Tool to the HTML5 environment. This has led to a significant investment of time as many of the frameworks and tools available for Flash development did not have an equivalent in the browser world. Another major time sink was rethinking a significant portion of our workflow and finding good replacements for visual components that would render correctly on devices of all sizes.

With the launch of SmartFoxServer 2X 2.14 we’re happy to announce the beta phase of the new HTML 5 AdminTool, which will replace the existing Flash-based one during 2020. Continue reading →

Object serialization between static and dynamic languages

Among the advanced features provided in the SmartFoxServer SDK is the ability to exchange any class instance between client and server with minimal coding intervention. This is particularly useful for statically typed languages such as Java, C# and Actionscript, while dynamic languages such as Javascript are not directly supported.

In this article we’re going to discuss an alternative way to implement custom serialization for classes that are needed from both client and server side to implement our game logic.

If you’re not entirely familiar with the topic of class serialization in SFS2X we recommend reading this article from our documentation Continue reading →

New JavaScript API v1.7.10 released

We just released v1.7.10 of the SFS2X JavaScript client API.

Starting from this new version, we completely reviewed the build process of the API.
This fixes some compatibility issues of the internal third-party libraries with module bundlers (like webpack) and also brings:

  • reduced API file size (-41%)
  • a source map to help debug the API, should unexpected issues show up in the future
  • the official SFS2X API package for the npm package builder
  • Node.js compatibility

As always, the new package is available on the download page of our website (other than in the npm repository, from now on).

In order to showcase the usage of the API with npm and webpack, we also released a variant Connector example describing the project setup and build process, including the new source mapping option.

Enjoy!

HTML5 / JavaScript tutorials

We just published the first batch of HTML5 / JavaScript tutorials describing the following examples in details:

  • Connector
    Learn how to configure the client and make your first connection
  • Simple Chat
    Learn how to create a basic chat environment for connected users
  • Advanced Chat
    Learn how to create a complete browser-based chat application featuring public chat messaging, Rooms management, private chat messaging and more
  • Game Lobby
    Learn how to create a “lobby” application where users can meet and invite each other to play games

All tutorials are available in our documentation website.

SmartFoxServer 2X 2.9.0

20140708_release_29A new SFS2X update is available with new powerful features and fixes discussed in the support forums recently:

  • Improved scalability and thread management via Auto-scaling Thread Pools. No more need to fine tune threads by hand
  • BlueBox v3.0: revamped and improved edition running on the latest Jetty 9
  • Integrated file uploads
  • Added support for websockets over SSL (WSS)
  • AdminTool: Extension Manager module, allows to manage, upload and deploy Extensions directly from the Admin GUI
  • AdminTool: administrators can now be given access to a selection of modules and server halt/restart permissions

… lots more …

You can read the full release notes and download the installer from here.
Also check the latest HTML5 client API supporting the WSS protocol and the porting of the SpaceWar game to Unity (available in the Unity examples package).

New SmartFoxServer 2X Update (2.4.0) available!

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A new update is available for SmartFoxServer 2X. It provides several fixes related to the latest issues discussed in the forums and includes new improvements. The cumulative patch can be applied to version 2.0.1 and higher. Please read the full release notes and download the update from our download section.

On the client side we have also released:

  • New HTML5/Websocket API release (final release)
  • New ActionScript 3 API
  • New Windows RT / Windows Phone 8 API (beta)