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[X3N]

http://www.smartfoxserver.com/

[bateleur]

Erm... how is this not just a blatant advertisement?

I assume you've used this thing. Any chance of a bit of detail? After all, it's been around as a commercial product for ages and has plenty of competitors.

[CiroContinisio]

I have used this for UFHO and I'm going to use it again. It's a great piece of software, plus there's a free licence for the professional version, but only up to 20 people playing together. Which is a lot: try gathering 20 people online playing your game at the same time, and then maybe you'll have to money to pay for a 100 users licence!!

The only thing is: you need a dedicated server (which costs a lot) because it needs the installation... is there any other software like this that you can put on the average domain, and it still works?

Also, Smartfox server has APIs for A LOT of platforms... iPhone, Flash, XNA, Ajax, Unity... ...

Also, they're italian! 

[X3N]

Should have put some more info in my first post.
I just re-found out about this - I haven't used it nor do I work for them etc, just wanted to share a cool link.

[Rob Lach]

I've been researching socket programming on the flash platform and in addition to SmartFox I've stumbled upon this:

http://www.unionplatform.com/

It looks impressively simple but I would definitely like to get some benchmarks between the two to see their memory/cpu loads on a server and how they scale.

[X3N]

That looks cool. Unfortunately I can't seem to type anything in their example chat program . Much lighterweight than SF

[CiroContinisio]

I only know that Smartfox is solid and reliable. Also, it has very flexible and powerful APIs. It's good for small-to-average-to-big projects, as Club Penguin demonstrated.