[SDL] Re: (a little OT) database suggestions for use w/SDL?

[Thatcher Ulrich]

> "Lyle Hanson" <lhanson at euclid.acs.NMU.EDU> wrote in message
> news:Pine.LNX.4.30.0103201042380.22799-100000 at euclid.nmu.edu...
> > Hi!
> >
> > In conjunction with the game I'm working on now, I want to develop sort of
> > a central high-scores server that games (not just mine) could use to track
> > high scores and statistics.  I'm pretty excited about it, it'd be neat if
> > users could see how they rank among the rest of the world.
> >
> > Anyway, after doing some thinking, I found that I'm pretty much talking
> > about a database.  Which doesn't thrill me so much, and I'd be utterly
> > uninterested in writing that part so I'm looking for existing database
> > libraries, etc. that I can use to store and query my score records.
> > Now, if I wanted to do it exclusively for linux I could just use its
> > existing database API, but that's simply just not as cool as
> > using SDL.  So how about it, anyone know what I can use on an SDL project?

When you're talking about an Internet application like this, it's
important to make a distinction between the server and the client.  The
client will be the game running on the user's machine, with graphics and
sound, using SDL etc.  On the other hand, for a high score table, there's
no reason for the server to run any game code, so there's not a great deal
of call for using SDL on the server side.

A typical industrial-strength cross-platform way to code the server side
is to use Perl with its DBI module in conjunction with whatever
web/database server software you want to run.  Perl is cross-platform, and
DBI abstracts the database interface (sort of SDL for databases).  But
unless you're going to distribute the server code so other people can set
up their own high-score tables, I'm not sure it matters much.

-Thatcher