

Show HN: Snack Words - Real-time, Multi-player Word Game for iOS - metajack

I just finished my first iOS game, Snack Words, which is a real-time, multi-player word finding game.<p>iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snack-words/id425786167?mt=8&#38;ls=1<p>YouTube video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zPQuqoUHqU<p>I wanted to build something very simple and minimal. There's no figuring out who to play, and each game is only 90 seconds long.<p>The backend is 2,400 lines (so short!) of Erlang which speaks a custom protocol (length tagged JSON packets) to the client. The Objective-C side protocol implementation makes heavy use of blocks and works a lot like my JavaScript XMPP library.<p>I hope you like it. Please let me know what you think.
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tm65atcolumbia
Just downloaded. Very nice! I welcome the minimalist interface. Look forward
to your story on the Erlang/XMPP technology decision.

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nivertech
Erlang is excellent, but XMPP is bad and ugly, as every other industry
standard.

I speaking as somebody involved in scaling ejabberd to huge number of
concurrent users and writing XMPP clients in C++.

If you already know Erlang - writing custom Erlang server with lightweight
JSON-based protocol over HTTP (comet or long-polling) will beat XMPP servers
any day.

