Tech stack choice

The goal on this for me mostly is

  • Working on understanding the UI design of this
  • Working on the rule side of things

I know that I want websockets for simplicity of real time updates. I think I could probably do the same with grpc but websockets feel cleaner as an initial step.

I also know that whilst I want to push some work client side, I do still need a backend both for communicating between players but also because I naturally don’t trust any game client that doesn’t also have backend validation.

Because of this I’m probably going to go Blazor Server.

With this:

  • Client/server interactions are super easy for me to reason about
  • If I want to go down the process of integrating authentication I can get OAUTH simple 1
  • I don’t need to learn a brand new programming language for the sake of this project, I could, and it would be interesting to re-implement this later in another language, but that’ll be a later journey
  • I can easily juggle client side and server side logic in shared libraries
    • I could probably do this in JS using something like Next.JS, but again, see 1
    • This feels like a non-negotiable, as much as this is a “for me” thing, I still care about it as a way to make the front end be able to render legal moves without needing external calls but still let the backend easily validate using the same logic.

There are some trade-offs I can think of:

  • Hosting isn’t as cheap/easy as if I went Lambda/API Gateway with a RESTful API,
    • I found an old issue from the dotnet/aspnetcore repo and am struggling to find much newer information, but it doesn’t look easily supported
    • I should probably look into Azure’s options for this, but, as I said in the intro to this I’m not caring about hosting at this point
  • It’s not learning a completely new language which would also be nice

I am however taking this as an excuse to play with TUnit so we’ll see how that goes!

Footnotes

  1. I know I can likely get this with just about any major web framework these days, but, what I know is still more simple than looking up additional things I don’t currently know which are outside the realm of what I want to learn. ↩ ↩2