Software Development from Ryan

Techcrunch posted about gpokr today, the the server was shutdown by the host, they received angry phone calls, and the server is running.

1. Up to 50 tables. Sure there are only ever 2 tables busy but maybe there will be a bit more traffic someday.
2. An ideas page base on ideas.43things.com. There’s some great ideas posted here.
3. Profile pages. Each player has a profile page which lists how they’ve interacted with the site.
4. A whole lot of playing statistics along with a new top holdem players page with a few different top 10 lists.

Well, they were ok for the shared hosting. I switched to their virtual dedicated server and along with a ordering mistake on their end the server that I eventually got was horribly over used and slow. So slow that the shared hosting was better.

I’ve had success with 1and1 in the past so I ordered their dedicated server. The setup was quick and the server performs well. It’s currently running gpokr.

Last night the gpokr server was updated to support more than one table along with some other bug fixes including “Check Wars” and “Folded gets Pot” bugs.

The week is off to a good start with a couple big blog posts driving traffic to gpokr keeping the table full with a waiting list most of the day.

jayisgames is a online games blog by Jay Bibby where he keeps very up to date on the latest online games and has generated a quite a large following. He also visted gpokr for a while and chated with his readers and worked his way to a top position on the gpokr top players list. (he’s been bumped down to 11th while writing this),

Also, the Google Web Toolkit Blog made a post today about some of the development that the GWT has been used with and made a mention of gpokr along with some other great work including Mark Roth ’s GWT Hang Man and  Robert Hanson’s GWT Widget Library.

Delicous introduced a nice little tool called playtagger which allows you to turn links to mp3’s into playable links. That is it inserts a little playbutton next to all mp3 links on a page. Its a nice small script that they’ve released for anyone to use.

This was a perfect solution for getting sound effects in gpokr, which is a texas holdem poker application written with GWT.

Its easy to put sound effects into a GWT application. Follow these steps:

1. Create a HTML widget:

   HTML sound = new HTML();

2. Make a function to play a sound with a filename as a parameter. This function sets the HTML in the HTML widget to an flash object which refers to the delicious playtagger swf file. The object size is set to 1×1 pixels since making it invisible causes the sound to not be heard in some browsers.

   public void PlaySound( String soundname )
   {
   	sound.setHTML( "<object classid='clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000' codebase='http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0' width='1' height='1' id='player' align='absmiddle' VIEWASTEXT>" +
        		"<param name='wmode' value='transparent' />"+
        		"<param name='allowScriptAccess' value='sameDomain' />"+
        		"<param name='flashVars' value='theLink=http://www.gpokr.com/"+ soundname +".mp3' />"+
        		"<param name='movie' value='http://del.icio.us/static/swf/playtagger.swf' />"+
        		"<param name='quality' value='high' />" +
        		"<embed src='http://del.icio.us/static/swf/playtagger.swf' flashVars='theLink=http://www.gpokr.com/"+soundname+".mp3' quality='high' wmode='transparent' width='1' height='1' name='player' align='absmiddle' allowScriptAccess='sameDomain' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' />"+
        		"</object>" );
   }

That’s it! Now every time you call PlaySound the mp3 will play in your gwt app. I’ll leave this up to the reader to wrap this up nicely in a class.

I updated the gpokr server today.

Sound - The sound now uses the delicious playtagger to play an mp3. This works better than an embedded wav file in both IE and Firefox.

Members - You can now sign up for to be a member and play. You’re chip count and information is stored in the database.

Photos - You can upload a photo so you’re more easily recognized at the table.

Send me an email with any questions or feature requests.