Elevating Heroes, Immortalizing Legends ⚔️ valkran.com
Valkran is an open-source, real-time leaderboard system concept. The initial version will be built with Vue.js, Valkey, and Go but will likely evolve to support more tech stack variants.
It will be designed primarily for games and competitive applications. By leveraging Valkey's in-memory data storage and high-speed operations, Valkran enables instant updates and retrieval of leaderboard data, making it ideal for applications requiring real-time ranking and score tracking across millions of users.
For a detailed overview of our development phases, milestones, and future plans, please refer to the Roadmap.
For a detailed checklist of our milestones and deliverables, please refer to the Plan.
Primarily designed for games and competitive apps, but it can be easily applied to other domains:
- Sports Analytics: Real-time stats and rankings for professional leagues (e.g., NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL)
- Education and E-learning: Track student progress and achievements in online courses
- Fitness and Health Tracking: Monitor user rankings for steps taken, calories burned, or workout streaks
- Sales and Marketing Performance: Showcase top performers or most effective marketing campaigns
- Web Analytics: Real-time tracking of website metrics, user engagement, and content performance
I've selected Valkey primarily for its speed, scalability, and real-time capabilities. Official Valkey GitHub
Key advantages of Valkey include:
- High Performance: Valkey is designed for speed, ideal for real-time leaderboard updates and score retrievals.
- Versatile Data Structures: supports various data types including sorted sets, perfect for managing rankings.
- In-Memory Processing: provides low latency for read / write operations, crucial for a leaderboard.
- Scalability: Valkey Cluster, allows our system to scale as the user base grows.
- Built-in Replication: replication features ensure high availability to prevent leaderboard downtime.
- Lua Scripting Support: Complex operations can be optimized via Lua scripting capabilities.
- Active Community: vibrant open-source community ensures ongoing development and support.
- Compatibility: Redis fork maintains compatibility with existing clients and tools; win.
For more detailed information about Valkey and its capabilities, please visit the Valkey Introduction. This comprehensive guide provides an in-depth look at Valkey's features, architecture, and use cases, helping you understand why it's an excellent choice for high-performance, scalable applications like Valkran.
I've been building apps with Vue.js for the past 4 years, and think it's a great framework.
Batteries-included benefits include:
- Best of Both Worlds: Combines Angular's structure with React's flexibility.
- Performance: Lightweight with efficient rendering for fast, responsive leaderboards.
- Reactive Data Binding: Keeps UI in sync with data, perfect for real-time updates.
- Composition API: Improves code organization and reusability.
- TypeScript Support: Enhances code quality and developer productivity.
- Vue DevTools: Powerful debugging and performance tuning.
- Scalability: Supports both small and large-scale applications.
- Easy Learning Curve: Accessible for new contributors.
- Strong Ecosystem: Provides all tools needed for a full-featured SPA.
- Go API Integration: Ideal front-end partner for a Go back end.
- Single-File Components: Promotes clean, maintainable code structure.
- Built-in Transition System: Creates smooth animations for changing leaderboards.
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Real-time Leaderboard Updates
- WebSocket integration for instant score changes
- Smooth animations for rank changes
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Responsive Design
- Mobile-first approach with desktop enhancements
- Adaptive layouts for various screen sizes
-
Player Profile Cards
- Quick view of player stats and achievements
- Social sharing capabilities
-
Multiple Leaderboard Views
- Global rankings
- Friend leaderboards
- Time-based competitions (daily, weekly, monthly)
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Search and Filters
- Find specific players or filter by various criteria
- Implement a sorted set in Valkey to maintain the leaderboard.
- Use Valkey's atomic operations for accurate, concurrent score updates.
- Cache frequently accessed leaderboard segments in Valkey for fast retrieval.
- Implement a WebSocket connection to push leaderboard changes to connected clients.
- Use Valkey to implement rate limiting on score submissions to prevent cheating.
The first version of the Valkran product should include:
- Valkey's high-speed data operations for real-time updates
- Scalability for handling many concurrent users and score submissions
- Client-side caching capabilities for fast leaderboard retrieval
- Use of Valkey's data structures (sorted sets) for efficient ranking
- Rate limiting implementation to showcase Valkey's utility in API protection
In future iterations, we can expand this prototype with features like:
- Player profiles
- Multiple leaderboards
- Time-based competitions
These additional features would further explore Valkey's capabilities and showcase its versatility in game development scenarios. The leaderboard should be useful for game developers, hobbyists, and projects that require high-performance web applications.
On the front end, Valkran will offer a responsive Single Page Application (SPA) designed for optimal performance across both mobile and desktop browsers. The UX would include a simple interface to display the leaderboard and allow score submissions. The demo will showcase real-time updates as scores change.
- Vue3 + Composition API: Leveraging the latest Vue features for efficient, scalable component design.
- Pinia: State management solution for Vue, providing a smooth and reactive data flow.
- PiniaColada: additional layer that works on top of Pinia, specifically focusing on data fetching and caching. Inspired by React Query but designed to work seamlessly with Pinia and Vue 3. Data flow with additional features like automatic persistence and simplified setup.
- Vite: Next-generation front-end tooling for fast development and optimized production builds.
- TypeScript: Enhancing code quality and developer experience with static typing.
- Tailwind CSS: Utility-first CSS framework for creating a responsive, customizable UI.
- Cypress: End-to-end testing framework for robust, reliable automated testing of web applications. Cypress provides a powerful set of features for writing, running, and debugging tests that simulate real user interactions, ensuring the application works correctly from the user's perspective.
- Vitest: Fast and lightweight unit testing framework for Vite projects. We'll use it for unit and component tests due to its speed, ESM support, and seamless integration with the Vue ecosystem, allowing for efficient and effective testing of Vue components and application logic.
We're exploring alien-signals for its potential to dramatically improve our real-time leaderboard performance:
- Ultra-Fast Reactivity: ~400% faster than Vue 3.4's reactivity system
- Minimal Overhead: Strict constraints ensure lightweight operation
- Efficient Updates: Optimized for real-time score and rank changes
For detailed implementation examples and considerations, see our Alien Signals Overview and Alien Signals + Valkey Integration.
- design, architecture, and implementation examples can be found in Front-end Details
- detailed information on Pinia and PiniaColada, refer to Front-end State Management
- for installing and configuring the front-end, please refer to our Front-end Setup Guide
- integration patterns for alien-signals and Valkey can be found in Alien Signals + Valkey Integration
- Go: Efficient and concurrent programming language for building scalable server-side applications.
- Huma: Modern framework for building Go APIs, providing clean and declarative endpoint definitions.
- Valkey: High-performance Redis fork by AWS, used for efficient data storage and retrieval.
- Asyncq: Distributed task queue for Go, used to spread work across machines.
- WebSocket: Protocol for real-time, bidirectional communication between clients and server.
- go-redis: Redis client for Go, facilitating interaction with Valkey.
- Middleware: Custom middleware for rate limiting and request validation.
- Error Handling: Utilizing Huma's error handling capabilities for consistent API responses.
- Configuration Management: Uses Huma's config system for managing environment-specific settings.
- Dependency Injection: Structuring the application for better testability and modularity.
- design, architecture, and implementation examples can be found in Back-end Details
- detailed info on back-end infrastructure setup is located in our Back-end Setup Guide
General overview of the basic stack, more details will emerge in time...
- Front-end Stack:
- Vue 3
- TypeScript
- Pinia (for state management)
- Vite (for build tooling)
- Back-end Stack:
- Go
- Huma (for API development)
- Database:
- Valkey (AWS's Redis fork)
- Cloud Infrastructure:
- AWS (EC2 or ECS for hosting)
- Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey
- S3 (for static asset hosting)
- CI/CD:
- GitHub Actions
- Additional:
- WebSocket (for real-time updates)
- Docker (for containerization)
Valkran welcomes contributions. This project aims to provide a robust, scalable leaderboard solution that game developers can easily integrate into their projects.
- Feature Development: Add new features or enhance existing ones.
- Bug Fixes: Help identify and resolve issues.
- Documentation: Improve our docs to help others integrate Valkran.
- Testing: Expand our test coverage and improve test scenarios.
- Performance Optimization: Help make Valkran even faster and more efficient.
- Open-Source Advantage: Free, customizable leaderboard solution.
- Learning Opportunity: Great project for developers to learn modern web technologies.
- Community-Driven: Features and improvements guided by real-world needs.
- Integration Ready: Easily adaptable for various game types and platforms.
We will focus on the following features for Phase 1 prototype
- Real-time updates using WebSockets
- Efficient data management with Valkey
- Responsive Vue 3 front end with TypeScript
- Scalable Go back end using Huma
- Easy deployment on AWS infrastructure
- Launch the npm package with core features.
- Develop a hosted version for enterprises (e.g., leaderboard-as-a-service).
- Expand into additional SDKs (Ruby, Flutter, Lua) based on developer interest.
Integrate with blockchain or NFT-based systems for gamified economies or decentralized scoring systems. For a detailed breakdown of our development phases and upcoming features, please check our Roadmap.
The name Valkran is a fusion of two key concepts: 'Valk' and 'Ran'.
'Valk' is derived from Valkyrie, the formidable female warriors of Norse legend chosen by Odin to select the most worthy warriors for Valhalla. This symbolizes our leaderboard system's ability to:
- Select and showcase top performers (like Valkyries choosing the best warriors)
- Provide swift, real-time updates (mirroring the Valkyries' speed and agility)
- Offer a robust and reliable system (echoing the Valkyries' strength and dependability)
'Ran' is a subtle nod to "ranking", which is at the core of any leaderboard system. It represents:
- The system's primary function of ranking players
- The continuous process of re-evaluating and updating rankings
- The race or "run" to the top of the leaderboard
The combination "Valkran" embodies our vision of a powerful, efficient, and discerning leaderboard system. It represents our commitment to:
- Swiftly process and display data
- Accurately rank and showcase top performers
- Provide a scalable and resilient system
Just as Valkyries were essential in Norse mythology for recognizing and elevating the most valiant, Valkran aims to be an indispensable tool for game developers in highlighting and celebrating their players' achievements. By combining the mythical power of the Valkyries ('Valk') with the core functionality of ranking ('Ran'), Valkran stands as a testament to the fusion of legendary inspiration and practical application in modern game development.
The Valkran project was conceptualized on the evening of October 12, 2024 by zanuka and will be in active development with the goal of launching Phase 1 by January 2025. I'm still trying to figure out what the heck I'm doing on a daily basis so... stay tuned!
- GitHub: @zanuka
- LinkedIn: Mike Delucchi
- Project Site: valkran.com
The artwork I featured in this project was generated using DALL-E, powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT-4