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‘A Cantina i Bifarelli’: a Java based environment for real-time multiplayer
Card Games
Introduction.
Antonio VOLPENTESTA
GIUDA Lab.
University of Calabria, ITALY
volpente@giuda.deis.unical.it
Antonio GRECO
GIUDA Lab.
University of Calabria, ITALY
agreco@giuda.deis.unical.it
Vincenzo PISCULLI
GIUDA Lab.
University of Calabria, ITALY
vincenzo@sungiuda.deis.unical.it
Nicola FREGA
GIUDA Lab.
University of Calabria, ITALY
nfrega@giuda.deis.unical.it
In ancient days folks of Cosenza (a city of Calabria, Italy), used meet together at night in a tavern called ’A
Cantina i Bifarelli. They played card games, as the Tressette, drinking wine and chatting about what happened
in their city.
Today ’A Cantina i Bifarelli does not exist anymore, but we have realized a software system to renew its spirit.
At the present time, many Web sites give the opportunity to play card games and this testifies the interest for
such a kind of applications in the Internet community (see Gamelan - http://www.gamelan.com or Jars -
http://www.jars.com).
The system may be regarded as an environment that allows users to communicate each other by a chat service,
while they are playing some card game on a virtual table. It has a client-server based architecture.
In the server-side we have a Java stand-alone application which manages client calls, message exchanges and
status variables for any ongoing game.
The client-side is based on some applets for managing the end-user graphical interface and the communication
with the server.
Our system is characterized by two main features:
• easy extensibility: a new card game may be immediately incorporated as soon as it has been implemented;
• finitely many card games can take place on different tables simultaneously.
In what follows we present the realized environment by briefly describing:
• the server architecture;
• the client/server communication protocols;
• the applets for the client architecture.
Moreover, we show the Web pages organization for an easy access to the environment. An extented version of
this paper can be found at http://sungiuda.deis.unical.it/java/HTML/paper.html. In such a version we give