Sun's Project Darkstar Game Server Platform No More

sproketboy writes "Project Darkstar, an open source software platform from Sun labs that simplifies the development of horizontally scalable servers for online games, is being discontinued as of the Oracle acquisition. This project, mentioned a couple of years back on Slashdot, was a unique concept for building an application server specific to on-line gaming. Sadly they were so close at version 0.9.11 (which is still very stable). Hopefully the open source community can get involved and help continue work on this project."

Sad

[Gusano]

Sadly I think this is the only real alternative for developing any mature MMOs under Java... so it's either the community taking the workload and continuing the project or it's back to C++ :-(

Re:One of many...

[Ardaen]

Define rational. Is money your primary or only measure? Only in the short term? The next quarter, maybe the next year?

A project like this, if it took off, could be quite good for expanding the usage of the Java language. It might not be a success or a big success, but calling it a blue-sky project seems a bit unfair. Unless of course value is only defined by the next quarter.

Encouraged Java

[Unoti]

A project like this, if it took off, could be quite good for expanding the usage of the Java language.

You're right- it did or would encourage the use of Java. But I never quite did understand that strategy, though-- how Java use helps Sun. Is it simply that a cross-platform language like Java is strategic to Sun just because it makes it so that one vendor doesn't dominate the entire market, therefore also-rans and non-dominating manufacturers (like Sun) have a better change at making sales?

Essentially, the Java strategy is or was all about leveling the playing field?

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has repeatedly stated that Solaris, along with SPARC, is going to have increased investment.

What would they replace Solaris with? Linux?

Please.

Linux isn't even 64-bit safe enough to allow single IO operations greater than 2 gigabytes [kernel.org]:

+/*
+ * rw_verify_area doesn't like huge counts. We limit
+ * them to something that fits in "int" so that others
+ * won't have to do range checks all the time.
+ */

Let's rewrite the headline

[swordgeek]

"Sun's Project Darkstar Game Server Platform No More"

Hmm. That doesn't seem right. Let's move a word.

"Project Darkstar Game Server Platform No More Sun's"

There. Not grammatically great, but it gets the point across. It's an open source project. The corporate backer is no longer backing it. It's still an open source project, and can be developed by the community.

That's a primary point of open source, isn't it?

If most OSS projects can't survive without corporate sponsorship and guidance, then the OSS model is a failure and needs to be rexamined.

Re:Encouraged Java

[julesh]

Is it simply that a cross-platform language like Java is strategic to Sun just because it makes it so that one vendor doesn't dominate the entire market, therefore also-rans and non-dominating manufacturers (like Sun) have a better change at making sales?

Essentially, the Java strategy is or was all about leveling the playing field?

Essentially, yes. Java attracts developers away from Microsoft-only environments and enables them to easily develop applications that will run on Sun hardware, even if they're using Windows as their development environment.

This is the same reason that IBM pours money into both Java and Linux development: both enable portability from commodity PCs to hardware platforms IBM sell with few or no changes to the application code.