title: Architecture for social multiplayer browser game (backend choice + frontend choice [flash/silverlight])
body: <p>I'm thinking about developing online multiplayer social game. The shared state of the world would require something fast on the backend, so the potential solutions seem to be:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>fast game engine on server (eg. c++ ) and some frontend language (php/python/ruby) + flash</p></li>
  <li><p>whole stack in python (using twisted or stackless python) + flash</p></li>
  <li><p>.NET (asp.net or asp.net mvc) + flash</p></li>
  <li><p>.NET + silverlight</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>first one may be an overkill from productivity point of view (3 heterogenous layers)</p>
  
  <p>Nr. 4 may be programmer's heaven (common environment on all layers), but:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>No such thing has been ever built with Silverlight, maybe there are some showstoppers hiding around the corner</li>
  <li>It may be hard to find silverlight designers</li>
  <li>Despite Flash movie/clip model being criticized when compared to SL full OO architecture isn't it an advantage when it comes to designing extra parts of the virtual world by external designers? They can just prepare .swf with eg. 4 perspectives of an item on 4 frames - wouldn't it be harder with SL?</li>
  <li>Silvelight apparently lacks in some gaming features (like collision detection)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>what do you think?</p>
  
  <p>[EDIT] The game itself would be part of the bigger portal - hence it would be nice to integrate the engine with some web framework.</p>