From: Stephen J Lamb DEV ALS CO UK> Date: 31 oct 1995 Subject: Re: Internet Shogi Server > > I have been thinking about using the Java programming language > > to help create a WWW-based "virtual" shogi club. When you > > enter the club's play area the server would automatically > > match you up with the most suitable waiting player and suggest > > a handicap and time limit (which can be negotiated by the > > players). When the game begins, the board could actually be > > displayed in it's own window and pieces moved around by > > dragging them with the mouse. > > This is a pretty neat idea. I personally could not use a shogi > server if one existed (though many people could) because > telnetting to game-related servers is not permitted by my > administrators. However, a WWW version of a shogi server I could > use. I think a telnetable server would be more popular, but such > a "virtual shogi club" would indeed be very interesting. Of > course, I hope you would take into consideration those of us who > don't have graphical WWW browsers but do have text-only WWW > browsers (such as myself)... To make use of Java-based WWW sites you need a Java-capable browser. Furthermore, since the whole idea of Java-capable browsers is to enable automatic downloading of code from a WWW site for execution on a host machine, which by assumption is GUI-based, I think it is unlikely anyone would be willing to update the text-only browsers to support this feature. So sadly people who are limited to using a text- based browser would be stuck. Still, in all honesty it would probably take me at least two years to get a Java-based WWW Shogi site up and running. So I suppose there is a need to set up a telnet Shogi server in the meantime. However, I'm not really interested in expending the effort to do this. Hopefully someone else will volunteer. If not then I suppose we will have to make do with the Go server for the near future. In fact, I think the reason it is hard to find any players there is not really because it is Go based. Rather, I think it is because people tend to visit the server at different times and therefore miss each other. There have been some postings recently about arranging times to visit the Go server in order to avoid this problem. This seems like a good workaround. Steve.