Chapter 2. Installing the Servers

If you have ever played Flash virtual world, such as the club penguin that was mentioned in the previous chapter, you may have had the following experience.

You load the web page in web browser and then log in with your username and password. You may need to fill out some basic information for the first time. Then the Flash player is launched and finally you are connected to the virtual world and can interact with others.

The socket server handles the virtual world after the player is connected to the virtual world. What about those web pages for virtual world information and SWF files? Yes, we need another web server and database server to handle the normal web request that is not the multiplayer part.

In this chapter, we will understand the relationship of the servers and install the needed servers one by one to get them to work with each other.

We will cover the following in this chapter:

• Compare the different features among the SmartFoxServer Lite, Basic, and Pro versions
• Compare the development and deployment environment
• Download and set up a third-party HTTP server and database
• Run an example from SmartFoxServer
• Set up the administration panel