A Component-Based Framework to Rapidly Prototype Online Chess Games for Home Entertainment

To reduce the cost and risk of developing computer games, game developers are increasingly adopting software engineering methods to produce game engines or middleware. In this paper, we take such an approach to develop a software framework for rapidly prototyping online chess games. A set of application programming interfaces (APIs) is pre-defined to deal with the technical details. Following the provided guidelines, any game programmer can use APIs to develop his own games in a time-efficient manner, and can connect the game to the platform as an application for all online players. To demonstrate how our framework can be used to develop a game conveniently and efficiently, we have used it to design a well-known Chinese chess game as an example.