Janice J. Heiss's Blog

October 2007 Archives

Project Darkstar's New World of Online Games

Anyone interested in game development, please take a look at my interview
with Sun Lab's Jeff Kesselman.

Here's the basic story: There appears to be a huge market for massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) that scale to thousands of users, but the technical and economic challenges have been -- until now -- enormous. They require expertise in multi-threaded programming, distributed computing, and transactional processes, along with deep pockets to sustain back-end processing resources.

Kesselman claims that the open-source release of Sun Labs Project Darkstar -- which offers Java technology–based infrastructure software designed for MMOGs -- has the potential to change the industry and eliminate the risks of dupe bugs, rollbacks, disasters and more. Of equal importance, developers should be able to create more dynamic, fun and interesting games.

Becoming a Better Programmer

Have a look at an interview I conducted with Java Champion Dr. Heinz Kabutz who frequently sets up shop with his laptop on the beach in Crete where he lives. Kabutz is the creator of the Java Specialists' Newsletter, which, after 150 issues, now has an audience of some 30,000 programmers in 114 countries.

Heinz makes interesting points:

* The java.util.Arrays class is a good example of bad code.

* The biggest misconception about Java concurrency he calls “The Law of Greek Driving.” Like driving in Greece, the Java Memory Model rules are not always enforced or obeyed by the JVMs. So concurrent code may seem correct and may test out on all available JVMs and hardware but might still be incorrect.

* Developers make a major mistake when they fail to unit test.

* His reaction to open sourcing the platform: The greatest "Huh?" of his professional life.

I'd love to hear what you think...

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