Recently Amazon announced the availability of european data-centers for their EC2 service. At Jawaker, we happily received the news; now our users (mostly from the middle east) will have access to our service over links with much lower latency (no trans-atlantic links to traverse).
Jawaker has been smoothly running in the EU availability zone for almost two weeks, and is now even faster and more responsive.
Enjoy :)
Jawaker is very social by nature; cards games are more fun to play with your friends. This is why we decided to emphasize the social aspect of Jawaker by creating a Facebook application. Facebook was our social network of choice because of the great amount of traffic it gets from Arab countries, which means that our audience likes it! Also, Facebook provides a very nice API, which allowed us to integrate Jawaker with Facebook both easily and beautifully.
Now, how does this work? It is pretty easy, all you need to do is have a Facebook account, and add the Jawaker application to your profile. Don't forget to bookmark the Jawaker application to be able to easily access it in the future.
Once you have the application added, you can link it with your Jawaker account by logging in with your Jawaker credentials on the linking page. This allows us to know which Jawaker account is yours. If you don't already have a Jawaker account, you can always register for free. You can also invite your friends to add the Jawaker application.
Once you and your friends have added the application and linked it, you can start creating private games from inside the Jawaker application. Your online friends will be notified about the new game, and they will see it in the Network Games box, where they can click on it to join you.
Don't forget, the more of your friends join, the more it is fun for everyone!
If you have any ideas or suggestions to make our Facebook application better, please leave a comment.
Jawaker is proud to announce the launch of its first new game; Trix Complex. Jawaker was originally launched with only one game and has now added a new game called Trix Complex, which is a popular variation on the original game Trix. This means that players will now have the option to play either game and will also notice that we have included separate gaming rooms for each of these two games. If you don't see your favorite card game on Jawaker yet, don't worry, because we plan on launching other card games in the near future to cater to every subset of our card playing audience!
I remember once reading that the two most important ideas in computer science were abstraction and caching (by the way, a statement to which I 100% agree!). In this post I will be talking about abstraction.
According to wikipedia abstraction is a mechanism and practice to reduce and factor out details so that one can focus on a few concepts at a time.
In building jawaker, we tried to model card-games with an abstraction general enough to deal with the most common card-games and yet be simple enough to implement and reason about. We ended up modeling card-games as movements of cards between card stacks (used here in the non-technical sense to mean a pile of objects) with side effects (updating score, etc.). This abstraction solved the problem neatly as we worked on our first game (Trix) and is proving to be quite adequate as we work on our coming games.
Jawaker has been written with scalability in mind, all along the way.
One of the decisions we took in this aspect was to use memcached to cache information about the games currently being played. Memcached is a general purpose distributed memory object caching system, think of it as a large hash table (a dictionary for Pythoners out there; a table of key-value pairs) loaded right into your memory (basically, the RAM), with the ability to spread over several machines if needed.
The idea is that accessing the memory is much faster than accessing the database, by caching data that is accessed often (such as data about games being played), we save valuable database read time. Database access becomes an issue as the number of queries increase, our solution reduces the number of queries needed, and can scale across multiple machines too!
This is in particular important since Jawaker is AJAX-based, and querying the server for updates happens often.
A couple of people from the Jawaker team, Mohamad Haj Hasan and Fouad Mardini, went to DemoCamp Dubai last week to demonstrate the application to a healthy crowd of people that included developers, bloggers and investors in the Radisson SAS in Dubai Media City. The event showcased a total of four web applications in a 15-minute presentation per application. Jawaker was well received by the attendees and we seemed to have created a small buzz within the community and were able to cement Jordan's place as the country for innovation in the Arab online space. It was also very exciting for us to see an article about us published in The National, a prominent daily paper in the UAE.
The concept of Jawaker stems from one of those basic ideas that many people think about, yet no one actually implements. Card games are a big part of many social circles in the Arab world, yet for some reason there is no existing community for people to play card games with each other online. It was this realization that brought about the light bulb moment that eventually turned into Jawaker. We built the application over six months of brainstorming, coding, design and branding; simplifying and enhancing the gameplay and user experience every step of the way. It was a combination of determination to provide great gameplay for users and the thrill of overcoming a challenge that made us decide to build the application using JavaScript instead of having a downloadable or Flash-based game.
I may have been there to help with some ideas and I surely contributed my fair share of Lighthouse tickets :) but the Jawaker application is the result of the hard work, long hours and unparalleled talent of the Boundless development team that built it. They should be proud of the fact that they built such a creative and entrepreneurial website for the entire Arab world to enjoy.
