In Chapter 8, Building a Basic XMPP-Based Pong Game we created the basics of XMPPong. We took a lot of shortcuts to get a basic game up and running. In this chapter, we will continue what we left in earlier chapter to build the pong game, by creating an XMPP component to manage more aspects of the game. In the previous chapter, we relied on each client to manage a lot of information; the position of the ball, the position of the paddles, the score, and we left the game wide open for someone to inject other messages into the conversation and throw off the game.
In this chapter, our component will keep track of the game state and prevent cheating. We will introduce the use of an XMPP-FTW
extension to allow us to create payloads of XML data that we can send through XMPP between the client and server component. The work we do in this chapter will prepare us for the next chapter, in which we talk about deploying XMPP applications...