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Girls (and Boys) Just Want to Have Fun

Posted by editor on June 6, 2007 at 11:11 AM PDT


Gaming by the hundred-thousand

To the casual observer, the MMORPG looks simple enough: everyone in the game can see and interact with everyone within a certain distance. Of course, the game developers out there know this is a tricky proposition, if only from making the graphics analogy to which objects in a scene should and should not be rendered. If each of 100,000 players needs to continually figure out and track the location of 99,999 other players, you're going to burn up a lot of CPU time just tracking other players, most of whom are trivial-reject cases.

Jack Strohm of Perpetual Entertainment -- the company working on Star Trek Online -- dropped by the java.net Community Corner booth at JavaOne to talk about his experiences working with Project Darkstar, the Java-based MMORPG server, and to share a mini-talk on approaches to solving this significant problem in practical ways. We've released this mini-talk as our latest JavaOne Community Corner Podcast, Managing Player Awareness in Darkstar. Those of you subscribed to the feed may already have this in your podcatcher, but if not, you can get the MP3 directly from the show page.

Later this week, we'll continue the gaming theme with a mini-talk podcast from Darkstar founder / community-leader Jeff Kesselman.

While we're on the topic of podcasts, we've topped the
Java Today, with episode 7 of
the Java Mobility Podcast, OpenLaszlo and Project Orbit, in which
Max Carlson, Laszlo Systems co-founder, and Hinkmond Wong, Sun senior staff engineer, discuss OpenLaszlo and Project Orbit. Designed to free content developers from worrying about runtime issues, OpenLaszlo supports zero-install deployment of Ajax applications in multiple environments. Project Orbit is the Sun Java ME viewer for Laszlo Web 2.0 content on set-top boxes and smart cell phones.

Chris Oliver announces a new update to JavaFX: "We just posted a new build of JFX which contains the following fixes and features: UI -- Shape Morphing, JavaFXPad to search for dependent classes, Mouse Wheel support in Canvas, and Baseline alignment of Text. Interpreter -- Bind is now only allowed in initialization contexts, Fixed array assignment problem reported on openjfx forum, Fixed bug with while condition of dur expression reported on openjfx user list. JSR 223 -- Fixed problems reported on openjfx user list."

Following on Neal Gafter's open wondering about removing checked exceptions in order to make a closures implementation easier, and Elliotte Rusty Harold's spirited defense of them, Artima asks its readers What Features Would You Remove from Java? "Removing features can be a useful part of keeping a language simple over time, especially as new features are added to the language. In a recent blog post, Neal Gafter asks whether checked exceptions could be a candidate for removal from Java. If not checked exceptions, then what features would you remove from Java?"

Bruno Ghisi shates thoughts on how to Globalize y[our] mobile applications in today's Weblogs. "In this entry, I introduce software internationalization (i18n) and localization (i10n) and then, I talk a little bit about JSR 238 - also called Mobile Internacionalization API - and how MSA will help to globalize mobile applications."

Kedar Mhaswade discusses a GlassFish feature-add in
GlassFish V2: On-the-fly upgrade of a developer domain ...
"Owing to growing popularity of clustering features of GlassFish V2, from build b48 onwards, we have added a nice feature to dynamically add the clustering support to an existing domain. I expect it to ease migration of your applications to the enterprise, by helping you scale those applications."

Finally, John O'Conner discovers
POJOs on the Desktop with the Java Persistence API.
"Reading the persistence portion of the EJB 3.0 specification, the best thing I discovered was that I could use plain ol' Java objects -- POJOs -- for both my application logic and persistence needs on the desktop."

In today's Forums,
kirillcool makes a case against some of SwingX's new approaches, in
Re: SwingX and third party LAFs.
"I've been thinking this over, and i think that i'd prefer the core way of doing things, namely paintBackground methods. There are two alternatives, images and painters, and both are at this point inferior to the usual core approach. [...] The painter approach looks better than paintBackground() API when you look at the SwingX as a separate project that provides its own core UI delegates. However, in a broader context of third-party LAFs it's just an extra overhead."

GlassFish user
benju complains of an inexplicable stall with
Application Client Web Start.
"I have been building an application on glassfish v2 beta 2 (as well as trying out b49 and b49) which an application client. The only problem I seem to be stuck on is why I keep getting "download stalled" every time I try to launch the application client via Web Start. While the application will eventually finish loading the download seems to stall and take a long time even over a 100mbit LAN connection. This "download stalled" message occurs every time at about 50% through the download process regardless of which of my computers I have hosting glassfish or if it is via internet or the local network."

Finally, phoneME user mmontesinos makes a call for
Full support for Windows Mobile 2003/ 5.0.
"I can see that the only platform fully supported for CDC is Linux/x86. It's a good future intention, but I think that it's not the most recommended platform, as the OS available for mobile devices uses to be mainly Windows Mobile, Symbian or Palm OS. I've noticed that the most viewed post in this forum is 'Building and running on Windows Mobile 5.0 (Pocket PC) iPAQ (1.985 views at the moment)' What about targeting a full support for these OS, maybe beginning with W.Mobile. I know there have been several aproachments, but at the moment Linux/x86 is the only 'official platform'."

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Gaming by the hundred-thousand

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