README-ALSO

gte
is a software suite to create games in extensive and
strategic form interactively, and to compute equilibria of
these games.

    The tool may also be used just for drawing extensive games.
    In particular, a simple future extension would allow
    creating games with 3 players only for drawing, with
    equilibrium-finding algorithms a separate matter.

GUI:
This is currently implemented as a Flash program in
Actionscript (files ending in .as). 
This is compiled with the  flex  package into a client
program that runs in a browser.

Game Solvers on the server:
The game generated by the GUI is stored in a file format and
sent to the server.
On the server side, that file is read in, and an algorithm
started. This algorithm maybe be a program written in some
native code, in particular C for the lrs program.
The output of this algorithm is then sent back to the client
to be displayed as a solution.

Current implementation:
At the moment, the server is NOT accessible under a public
URL, because
(a) the program is only a prototype under development so far;
(b) we do not have server resources, in particular for
    larger games which take exponential time to solve;
(c) security with the native algorithms is not clear;
(d) running it on the Google app engine (as in an earlier
    version) does not allow the use of native algorithms,
    only Java programs (precisely for security reasons);
(e) there should be a downloadable version for people who
    want to solve larger games.

These issues are addressed as follows:
- a local server is started called  Jetty
- the client communicates with that local server on your
  machine
- all native algorithms also run locally

This requires a number of installations, documented in the
file  README (see numbers there):

1. Java for the server code
2. ANT (a make-like utility for compilation)
3. Jetty
4. Flex 
8. C compiler for the native code.

After all these installations, any update of the project
only requires re-compiling the server and client.

The following are configured LOCALLY on your computer and
stay there: the file  build.properties  that contains the
paths to the  flex  and jetty installations.
EXAMPLES of  build.properties:

on Windows:
   FLEX_HOME = C:\\Program Files\\Apache Software Foundation\\flex_sdk_4.1.0.16076A
   JETTY_HOME = C:\\Program Files\\Apache Software Foundation\\jetty-distribution-8.1.2.v20120308
   WAR_DIST_DIR = D:\\jetty\\webapps
   JETTY_DIST_DIR = D:\\jetty
   JETTY_ZIP_DIR = D:\\jetty
    
on Linux:
   
    FLEX_HOME 		= /home/stengel/bin/flex
    JETTY_HOME		= /home/stengel/GPORTAL/JETTY/jetty-distribution-7.6.1.v20120215
    WAR_DIST_DIR    = /home/stengel/GPORTAL/JETTY/jetty-distribution-7.6.1.v20120215/webapps
    JETTY_DIST_DIR  = /home/stengel/GPORTAL/JETTY/jetty-distribution-7.6.1.v20120215
    JETTY_ZIP_DIR   = /home/stengel/GPORTAL/JETTY/jetty-distribution-7.6.1.v20120215
     
Once you get updates from the   gte  project  (with git
pull), all you need (in Linux) is run in the gte directory
the command

    ant makeWarFile   

which creates the file    gte.war   which contains the
client program.
To see what does, reload the client program in your browser at the URL

    http://127.0.0.1:8080/gte/

If you get the browser message

    Unable to connect
    Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at
    127.0.0.1:8080.

then the jetty server is down, and you need to start it (in
JETTY_HOME, which above is the Linux directory 
/home/stengel/GPORTAL/JETTY/jetty-distribution-7.6.1.v20120215
) with

     java -jar start.jar

If you want to contribute to the  gte  project, the first
thing you need to do is to successfully install these
things, and to see if you can re-compile the war file when
there have been changes to the GUI.