So what is Firebase?

• Game Application Server - Firebase contains an API for server development in the programming language Java. It also offers small libraries in several languages, currently C++, Java and Flash, which transparently handles the network communication for the game. In addition, Firebase also contains ready made common functionality, for example login, seating, lobby data representation and distribution, and much more.
• High Availability Platform - Firebase is built from scratch to be fail-safe. It duplicates messages and data for redundancy. As a result you can start or stop single servers in the cluster without affecting game play, Firebase automatically adapts when servers are shut down or added to the cluster.
• Scalable Backbone - As a consequence of the high availability design and automated adoption to cluster changes, Firebase scales extremely well. It can be run on anything from a single consumer grade laptop to a cluster of high-end multi-core servers. A Firebase cluster can even be upgraded without stopping the game play: just add a new server.

The Features

We'll divide the features into several rough groups. This is by no means a complete feature list, but it does cover the essentials. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to contact us.

Common Abstractions

• Integrated table and lobby chat channels.
• Standard abstractions for tables, players and lobby.
• Standard commands and handling for common actions such as "sit", "leave", "login" etc.

Game Development

• Customizable login procedure.
• Private tables. Table can be created on request by clients.
• Waiting lists and chat filtering.
• Transparent thread safety.
• Transparent network delivery. All network code is handled by the platform.
• JTA support for event processing.
• Simple deployment.
• Deployable data sources.
• JPA support.
• Guice DI support.
• Server side scripting.

Lobby Data

• Managed distributed dataset for lobby data.
• Server and client access libraries.
• Client delta change updates significantly reduces bandwidth consumption.
• Subscription model, changes are pushed to the clients.

Tournament Support

• Separate tournament API.
• Tournament logic separated from game logic.
• Support for very large tournaments.
• Re-usable tournament logic. One tournament implementation can handle many game types. 
• Simple deployment.

Extendable Architecture 

• Public API for services. Services are first-level members of a server and are used to extend the platform.
• Multi-contract deployment. One service may provide several public contracts.
• Service messaging. Services can receive and send events to clients.
• Simple deployment.

 Simple Deployment

• All artifacts are deployed as simple ZIP archives, comparable to a J2EE deployment.
• Configurable "activators" are responsible for creating tables and tournaments.
• Artifact isolation. Each game, tournament and service has its own class loader.
• Shared deployment library folders.
• Homogeneous deployment across cluster.
• Unified archives. Several archetypes may be deployed together.

Core Platform

• System monitoring via JMX.
• Configurable session management.
• Client failure detection via ping.
• Dynamic cluster topology. Servers can be started and stopped without bringing down the entire cluster.
• Single point of common configuration via the master nodes.
• Synchronous inter-cluster communication.
• SSL support.