Welcome to the Firebase Community pages! Here you can download Firebase, download games, check out some tutorials, discuss with other developers and more.

What is this Firebase thing anyway?

• Firebase is a multiplayer game server written in Java. You write your game against our API and then you deploy it to the server much like you would do with a web application and a web server. What kind of games I hear you ask? Well, poker, dice games and mahjong has already been done. Any board game, turn based game would work. We've even written 1st person shooters with it, altough that's stretching it a bit.
• Firebase comes with client APIs in Java, Flex and JavaScript. The protocol is well documented, open and generated from XML specifications using an open source tool, so you can easily add another language to the list. We'll be happy to help!
• Firebase comes with tournament support. And what's more, it's game agnostic, meaning that you can write a type of tournament once and then apply to all you games. Nifty, eh?
• Firebase supports your usual list of enterprise abbreviations: JTA, JPA, IoC, JDBC, JMX, SSL etc. It has transparent thread safety, managed transactions, transparent network delivery as well as simple deployment of artifacts.
• Firebase supports dependency injection via Guice. Spring support is on the to-do list.
• You can write games in several scripting languages. The Firebase script support is based on Java JSR 223 and support Ruby, Groovy Python, JavaScript and many more.
• Firebase supports Maven. Not only can you build with Maven, we have ready-made artifacts for packaging your code, archetypes to get you up and running literally in no time at all, and even a plugin for running Firebase from Maven with your current project deployed.
• Firebase has built-in support for lobby data. Ever tried to keep track of a huge lobby, or list of available games? Firebase gives you delta updates out of the box. Changes are pushed to the clients and clients can subscribe to changes from a subset of the lobby only, thus minimizing bandwidth requirements.
• Firebase Community Edition is open source and distributed under the AGPL license. You can download and use it pretty much however you want to as long as you comply with the AGPL. And if you'd like to escape the AGPL and additionally get access to transparent clustering, with high availability, fail-over and so on? We'll there's the Enterprise Edition just waiting for you.

If you still have questions, hit the FAQ, the forums, the Wiki or the Enterprise Edition pages, or simply drop us a line, we'd love to hear from you!

Welcome!