SCRABBLE.GZ: A Web-Based Collaborative Game to Promote the Galician Language

We present in this paper a web-based version of a scrabble game, describing its architecture and some implementation details. This architecture makes possible a high degree of interactivity, so that the players perceive the game as being played in real-time. Furthermore, no client-side plug-in or applet issued. These properties are achieved by means of a carefully designed architecture that uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XMLXML) for data exchange. This architecture guarantees low load on the server, so complex computations relative to the game logic can be done in real-time. Moreover, data structures and algorithms were designed to efficiently access a custom Galician dictionary, which supports the game functionalities. We show in this paper how this data structures and algorithms provide an efficient method to create a Scrabble move generation algorithm. We also show how the combination of these with the architecture proposed provides a fully interactive Web application that can handle complex calculations over a very large lexicon with real-time appearance.