How to implement Facebook leaderboard game for mobile?
- by TrueGrime
I am in the final stages of developing an indie C# mobile game that I will deploy to iPhones and Androids using Mono.
I wish to add push notifications and a Facebook leader board feature into the game, such that the user will be presented with a list of all his/her friends that are playing the game and their weekly scores in the main screen.
I have ZERO experience with web development/networking/databases. I recently started researching the field and formed a basic understanding. Facebook has SDKs in PHP, JavaScript, obj-c and java, tho reading the documentation examples still feels cryptic to me since it involves web/server tech. After researching some more, I understood that my options for server side are basically PHP or ASP.Net. It seems that ASP.Net is more favorable in my case since I am already proficient with C# (but there is no ASP.net SDK from Facebook... I am not sure if this implies that I cant interact with Facebook using ASP.Net). On the down side some have mentioned higher costs for ASP.Net, tho I havent looked further into that aspect yet. I also understood that JavaScript is client side technology.
I started going through tutorials of ASP.Net, I was thinking that ASP.Net is a purely server side management language, but it started feeling more like WPF as those tutorials started getting into very lengthy discussions about creating website interfaces and styles. I am not interested in that, I just want to have a web server which my app can somehow communicate with and get friends/scores. Am I learning the right technologies for my goal? should I be learning something else?
I am posting this in hopes that someone who knows this field well can see through my problem and help guide me, otherwise I could spend months studying something that might not be the right solution to my goal. Thanks.