Project Darkstar: A Scalable Application Server for Networked Games, Virtual Worlds, and MMOGs
TS-4575

Today's business applications take advantage of horizontally scalable, high-throughput-oriented computing platforms to meet the ever-increasing capacity demands of users. However, for developers of some applications -- including online games, virtual worlds, and social networking software -- the demands for short user response time and low latency are somewhat at odds with the high-throughput focus of modern systems architectures.

This session is an all-new deep dive into Project Darkstar, an open-source server-side Java platform that focuses on these problems and aims to enable developers of these applications to more easily and successfully harness the power of today's computing technologies. More than just a communications framework, Project Darkstar boasts a simple API that transparently provides a multithreaded, transactional, persistent, and scalable system without the need for zones or shards.

Any developer of networked games, virtual worlds, social networking software, or other online applications will benefit from this brand-new technical session, which provides an overview of the API and how the technology directly addresses these challenges. It also covers

• Typical technical challenges faced when developing scalable networked games and similar applications
• Recent advances and current work being done on and with Project Darkstar
• The actual design and code of Project Snowman, a new 3-D action game built with Project Darkstar