Jeff Dillon

Enterprise Gaming
The other week, I attended a Java One Premeire presentation on Sun's project to create a game server. The presentation focused on the fact that the gaming industry, specifically Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), are experiencing many of the same problems that enterprise environments have been dealing with for the past few years. Today's online games require a large base of servers for controlling various aspects of the game and allowing users to interact. A MMOG requires data persistence, a large grid of server systems, synchronization, and authentication. While many game developers are experts at graphics and other "client side" issues, they are really not experts with databases, security issues, or networking. In fact, some of these issues detract from the game development process. Game developers are not in the business of dealing with these sorts of issues, they are in the business of designing great games. The presenter discussed how many game development shops are coming up with their own solutions for problems that have already been solved in the enterprise world. These custom solutions often have limitations that were not anticipated during the design. Sun's idea is to bring many of the technologies that have proved so useful to the enterprise world to the server side gaming industry. This group at Sun has been talking to game developers for quite some time and is developing a custom solution specifically aimed at solving these problems in the MMOG market.

A database transaction seems more exciting when it is powering the next version of an online game.