June « 2011 « Shahzad Bhatti

June 21, 2011

Overview of Trading Floor Game for iOS

Filed under: iPhone development — admin @ 4:51 pm

Introduction

The Trading Floor is a social game based on auction-styled stock trading where you trade virtual stocks and options with your friends and family. Each game lasts for a day, where you join a game as a stock broker with objective of buying stocks at low-price and selling at high-price, thus making most money from the trades. Unlike a real-world stock market, each game is limited to a single exchange, which can be public or private. In addition to trading, the Trading Floor brings a lot social aspects to the game such as building private exchanges, which can be only joined by your friends and expressing like-ability for a company, which determines a Buzz for the company. Also, the members can view activities for other players in a game, view their gain/loss from the trading, view ranking of the players in terms of gain/loss and comment on their trades. At the end of a game, the top players for each game are awarded badges, which are permanently visible from their profile.

Getting Started

You can download Trading Floor from Apple AppStore.

iPad	iPhone

You would see listing o active games that you can join. A game is started for each exchange in the system which can be public or privately created by the users.

Joining a game

When you click on games, you would see listing of all games such as:

From there you can select the game that you wish to join and you would be prompted to enter a nick name that you can use to join the game such as:

iPad	iPhone

If an exchange is private, you would require a password to join and would need to contact the owner of the exchange. After clicking the Join button the Trading Floor would allocate a virtual cash of $10,000 to you and would create a portfolio with stocks and options for ten companies, where five of the companies are chosen from your favorite companies and five companies are randomly chosen. It takes about a minute to populate all the portfolio and then you can start trading. After joining the game you can also browse other players, view activities, portfolio, capital gains, orders and badges. There are also buttons below to quickly select between players, view rankings, floor bids, comments and lookup quotes, e.g.

iPad	iPhone

Browsing Players

You can see list of players that have joined the game by touching “Browse Players” option, e.g.

iPad	iPhone

When you select the player, you will see more details about the player and view activities, orders, portfolio, capital gains, badges, etc. as displayed above.

Selling Stocks/Options from Portfolio

When you select “Portfolio” option, you would see summary of your available cash and list of all stocks/options you hold such as:

iPad	iPhone

When you select “Sell” link, you would be taken to the order screen such as:

iPad	iPhone

You can specify your selling price and then select “Sell” button to submit the bid. It would take you to the Floor Bid, which lists all bids for buying and selling stocks/options.

Floor Bids

The Floor Bids show all companies available for buy or sell. When you post bids to sell or buy, the go to the floor bids. You can accept the bids that other players have posted for stock/option sell or buy on the Floor Bids. Note that when you post bids you specify the price for the stock but when you accept bids you don’t negotiate. If you need to change the price for your bids, you can edit your open orders. Also, when you trade stocks or options, you are only trading to the people who are in the same exchange.

iPad	iPhone

When another user accepts your bid, the sale is completed and you would collect gain/loss from the trade.

Capital Gains

You can view your overall capital gains as result of trading or portfolio gain because the market price for your stocks went up from the player details, orders or portfolio screen. You can drill deep into your capital gain and find out how much profit/loss you made for each order by selecting Capital Gains option from the home screen or selecting Capital Gains row from the player details, orders or portfolio screen.

iPad	iPhone

Quote Lookup

You can lookup stock/option quotes as well as latest news for the companies from Quote-Lookup menu option. You can also buy or sell stocks from the Quote-Lookup screen based on your portfolio.

iPad	iPhone

In addition to buying and selling stocks/options, you can express how you feel about a company by liking/disliking/loving/hating. This in turn determines the buzz quote for that company. The more players like a company, the higher the buzz quote value that company would have. Unlike buying and trading stocks/options, which are limited to a single exchange (both public and private), the buzz quote is calculated across all exchanges. However, buzz quote is reset when the Trading Floor market is closed (11pm EST). Here is another benefit of Buzz Quote, the BOT player would buy stocks from you at the Buzz Quote price. So, if a stock becomes popular you can make more profit by selling it to the BOT.

Orders history

You can view your past orders for selling or buying stocks/options by selecting “Orders” option, which would show something like:

iPad	iPhone

You can also drill into details for each order by selecting the row for the order such as:

iPad	iPhone

Player Rankings

You can view your the rankings of players for each game by selecting “Rankings” option which lists players sorted by the capital gains they earned, e.g.

iPad	iPhone

Comments

You can view comments on the game by selecting “Comments” option, e.g.

You can add your own comment by selecting “+” icon and typing your message, e.g.

My Badges

The top players for each game get badges at the end of the game, which are permanently visible under the “Badges” option, e.g.

When you select your badge, you will be taken to the old game that you played and can go back to your portfolio, orders and other details.

Exchanges

The exchanges are places where public companies are listed for trading. You can join exchanges created by your friends or build your exchanges. A unique game is started for each exchange, where member players trade against other member players. You can view both public and private exchanges by selecting “Exchanges” from main menu . You would see three types of exchanges: mine, public and private. Mine would list all exchanges that you have created, public would list all public exchanges and private would list top private exchanges. You can also search private exchanges.

iPad	iPhone

You can create your own exchange by selecting “+” icon and typing in the exchange symbol, name and password, e.g.

You can then let your friends know about the exchange symbol and password so that they can join them.

Industries

You can view top level industries by selecting “Industries” from the main menu, e.g.

iPad	iPhone

When you select an industry, it would list all companies that belong to that industry.

Companies

You can browse or search over 20,000 companies by selecting “Companies” option from the main menu, e.g.

iPad	iPhone

When you select a company, it would show latest quote, news and buzz quote for that company.

Companies Around Me

Trading Floor takes advantage of your geo-location capabilities and finds companies that are located near your location, e.g.

Leader Board

The leader board shows top players with most capital gains for all the games that they have played over last month. This option uses Game Center and requires login to the Game Center. You can post your scores to the leader board by selecting the \”Post Capital Gains\” option from the main menu. Also, you can send match invites to your friends at Game Center.

In the end, I hope you find Trading Floor, a fun game for your friends and family and you may learn a few things about the stock market as well. Enjoy!.

Comments (0)

June 1, 2011

Deploying Rails 3.0 App on Amazon EC2

Filed under: EC2 — admin @ 12:56 pm

It’s been a few years since I wrote a short HOW-TO on working with EC2 , but recently I tried to migrate the backend of Trading Floor – Facebook and iOS game I have been developing to EC2. So I am documenting the steps for setting up the EC2 for Rails 3.0.

Pre-requisites

I assume you already signed up for EC2, otherwise go to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ to signup. Also, you will need Java 5.0 or above, which you can download it from Oracle.

Download EC2 API Tools

First, download EC2 from http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=351 and uncompress it in your root directory.

Create a X.509 Certificate

Next, create a X.509 certificate from the AWS Account section. You can then download your certificate and key safely, e.g. I saved them in .ec2 directory under my home directory. Note that you will not be able to download the key again, so don’t lose it.

Environment Variables

Next, I changed my shell as:

 export EC2_HOME=~/ec2-api-tools-1.4.2.4
 export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
 export EC2_KEY_DIR=~/.ec2
 export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=$EC2_KEY_DIR/pk-HFG55OCFPZARA6YHW5JGIE6JFD7EQE72.pem
 export EC2_CERT=$EC2_KEY_DIR/cert-HFG55OCFPZARA6YHW5JGIE6JFD7EQE72.pem

Where EC2_PRIVATE_KEY and EC2_CERT points to the X.509 key and certificate I downloaded from the Amazon.

Create a Key-Pair

Then I created a pair of keys as:

 ec2-add-keypair plexobject

Create a Security Group

I then created a security group for the server

 ec2-add-group web -d 'Web Server'
 ec2-authorize web -P tcp -p 22 -s 0.0.0.0/0
 ec2-authorize web -P tcp -p 80 -s 0.0.0.0/0
 ec2-authorize web -P tcp -p 443 -s 0.0.0.0/0

Finding a basic Ubuntu based AMI

Previously I used S3 based AMI, but Amazon now supports EBS based AMIs that has advantage that any changes to the root survive instances of EC2. I launched EC2 instance with basic Ubuntu 11.0 Natty from http://alestic.com/ as:

 ec2-run-instances ami-06ad526f --instance-count 1 --instance-type m1.small \
 --key plexobject --group web -z us-east-1d -m

Where -z describes the availability zone and -m turns on monitoring.

Installing Ubuntu Packages

I then proceeded to install basic packages such as Java, Curl, Git, Build, Ruby (1.8.7) and Rails (3.0.3) based on Rails/Ubuntu docs such as:

 sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
 sudo apt-get install mercurial
 sudo apt-get install curl git-core build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline5-dev
 sudo  apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev 
 sudo apt-get install ruby
 sudo apt-get install rubygems1.8
 sudo gem install rubygems-update
 sudo update_rubygems
 sudo gem install rails

I then edited /etc/profile /etc/bash.bashrc and added environment variables

 export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/
 export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk/

Next, I installed Sqlite and Mysql:

 sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
 sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby
 sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
 sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev

Next, I installed Apache and Passenger:

 sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev
 sudo apt-get install apache2-dev libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev
 sudo gem install passenger
 sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module*

I then edited /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and added:

 LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
 PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7
 PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

and then restarted apache

 /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Creating EBS Volume for Data

Next, I created an EBS volume to store all data such as database tables and Rails application from the AWS Console and then attached it to the instance as:

 ec2-stop-instances i-73ab181d 
 ec2-attach-volume  vol-612eaa0a -i i-73ab181d -d /dev/sdf
 ec2-start-instances i-73ab181d

Note that you have to create the EBS volumen in the same availability zone as your instance. I then logged into my machine using

 ssh -i plexobject.pem ubuntu@ec2-50-19-134-251.compute-1.amazonaws.com

and then formatted the newly built EBS volume as:

 sudo fdisk -l
 sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf

I then edited /etc/fstab and added

 /dev/xvdf       /data   auto    defaults,nobootwait,noatime     0       0

and then rebooted machine

 sudo reboot

Moving Mysql Data Directory

Mysql installs data directory on the root volume in /var/lib/mysql directory, which I wanted to move to newly created volume. So I created a directory /data/mysql so I stopped mysql:

 sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

I then copied mysql data directory such as:

 sudo cp -R -p /var/lib/mysql/mysql /data/mysql
 sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /data/mysql/

I didn’t copy entire mysql directory, only mysql subdirectory. Next I edited /etc/mysql/my.cnf and changed datadir to /data/mysql directory and then edited /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld and changed all /var/lib/mysql to /data/mysql. Finally I restarted AppArmor profiles as:

 sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor reload

Then restarted mysql:

 sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

I changed my root password and created a local mysql user as

 mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('mypass');
 mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'tfuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypass' WITH GRANT OPTION;
 mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON dbname.* TO 'tfuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypass';

I copied my app to /data/trading_floor and changed permissions of all files to www-data

 sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /data/trading_floor

Then created /etc/apache2/sites-available/tf with

 
         ServerAdmin shahbhat@gmail.com
         ServerName tf.plexobject.com
         DocumentRoot /data/trading_floor/public/
         
                  AllowOverride all
                 Options -MultiViews
                 RailsEnv production

Finally, I restarted apache

 /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Creating Elastic IP address

I wanted a permanent IP address for the server so I created EIP using AWS Console. Then associated my instance with the new IP address:

 ec2-associate-address 50.19.248.7 -i i-73ab181d

It rebooted your machine with the new IP address. I then changed DNS zone and pointed tf.plexobject.com to 50.19.248.7 (this may take hours to propagate). Next, I changed my Facebook app’s configuration and iOS app’s configuration to point to tf.plexobject.com.

Creating my EBS Image

Once I was happy with the server configuration, I created EBS image for future use. First, I detached data volume and then created image as follows:

 ec2-stop-instances i-f97ca197
 ec2-detach-volume vol-3f65d954
 ec2-create-image i-f97ca197 -n tf-20110601 -d 'Trading Floor Application Server'

I terminated my previous instance as

 ec2-terminate-instances -i  i-f97ca197

and created instance with the new image

 ec2-run-instances ami-80837ae9 --instance-count 1 --instance-type m1.small --key tf --group web -z us-east-1d -m

After the launch, you would have to reattach the data volume

 ec2-stop-instances i-73ab181d 
 ec2-attach-volume  vol-612eaa0a -i i-73ab181d -d /dev/sdf
 ec2-start-instances i-73ab181d

Summary

Voila, I had my game application running on the cloud. In order to cut per/hour cost I reserved instances for entire year. I am not quite done with my server and am now working on application specific configuration and adding better monitoring/backup. As, we have learned from recent Amazon Cloud outage that deploying your app on the cloud is only half the work, making it performant, scalable and fault tolerant is other half which is still manual work. Finally, I plan to release the Facebook app for Trading Floor and submit iOS app in a couple of weeks, be sure to try it and send me your suggestions.