Can GAE act as an XMPP server?

Question

I'm thinking of building a multi-player game using GAE. When player A makes a move, I'd like to record the details and then let player B know about the move.

I thought that I might get some open-source XMPP library in my client and notify presence to my app if that is possible? I wouldn't want to force the player to sign-up to a service like google talk, so I'll generate jid's on the fly based on session id.

Would like to hear from you!

Thanks

Answer 1

You are not going to be able to make your gae app an xmpp server because you cannot open sockets - doing so is restricted by the api.

However, you don't need to run an xmpp server to achieve what you want to do. You can use the XMPP libraries available in the appengine api to make your app a client that your game 'clients' talk to see the python api here: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/xmpp/. Not all your game clients need to be gtalk clients, but they will need to be able to bridge into gtalk, which I believe most will be able to.

There is a short example here: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/using_xmpp.html

Answer 2

Might be worthwhile spending 15 mins to look at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) You can deploy a cloud server for about 2 cents an hour. Here's a good overview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAB8wCg9MyE&feature=player_embedded