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Architecture

mirror-web-server​

As mentioned in our open-source announcement blog post, one of the key things missing from typical game development is an out-of-the-box web server that handles everything, which mirror-web-server provides in a stable, highly-efficient, and scalable manner:

  • Authentication via Firebase
  • MongoDB: NoSQL Database
  • Mongoose: Flexible ODM (Object Document Mapper, the document DB version of an ORM from SQL)
  • HTTP requests
  • Websockets
  • Modular and extendable architecture
  • Pub/sub functionality via Redis
  • Type safety with Typescript
  • Dockerized
  • All neatly bundled with OpenAPI Swagger documentation

The Mirror's web server is built on NestJS, arguably the best thing to happen to NodeJS since Express. It uses TypeScript, which is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Database: MongoDB​

The Mirror uses MongoDB: a NoSQL database that stores data in flexible, JSON-like documents. It is a popular choice for many modern web applications because it can store data of any structure, which is particularly useful when the data is not known in advance.

Why MongoDB and Mongoose?​

We get this question a lot and especially "Why not SQL?"". Here are the reasons:

  • Flexibility: The schemaless of MongoDB nature allow for maximum flexibility. For example, if the text you need to store is 1000 characters instead of 64, you don't need to run a migration. In fact, you could have just set the field (a SQL column) to "text" and that's it; no need to specify character limits ahead of time. It saves you tons of time with architecture so you can get up and running quickly
  • Application-level schema: Mongoose keeps the schema at the application level instead of DB level, allowing for faster development iterations with minimal (or zero) migration
  • JSON Data Format: The data format is quite close to JSON (BSON), which is the primary data transfer format of the web. The saves you from needing extra serialization
  • JSON & TS/JS: JSON and Typescript/Javascript go hand-in-hand, so this allows for rapid development on the web dev side
  • Open-Source: MongoDB is open-source and has a huge community behind it
  • Scalable: MongoDB is horizontally scalable, which means you can add more servers to your MongoDB database to handle more traffic. You can also use sharding to distribute data across multiple servers
  • Minimal migration headaches: Migrations technically aren't required at all with MongoDB. You can just add a new field to your schema and start using it immediately, a massive time saver

More architecture details coming soon!