keith thompson

It has been awhile since my last note but I've been busy. In fact, earlier this year I found myself in a very familiar situation... working on a demo. We had three months to do it, but this time it was not going to be a demo shown at a booth under a nice controlled environment like Snowman at GDC, nooooo... this time the server was going to be on the internet and all 8,000 (or whatever) attendees of JavaOne 2009 would be handed a client. The origin of this insanity came from the JavaFX team. We (the Project Darkstar team) had innocently contacted them, inquiring about the possibility of using JavaFX clients with the Darkstar stack. When we got on the phone they started talking about an idea they had about doing a demo for JavaOne using Darkstar, what timing! (I often wonder what would have happened if we hadn't called them?) Anyway, Anthony Rogers and Moises Chicharro (the JavaFX dudes) were obviously crazy enough to be convinced it was possible and apparently so was I. I talked myself and by bosses into temporarily shelving my current work and have at it.

The next couple of months was... interesting, and for the most part fun. I built the server, some client libraries, and tools while Ant and Mo built the JavaFX based client. The result was Darkchat, a multiplayer visual chat environment. The visual client was brilliant (kudos to Ant and Mo) and fun to use. It, along with the server did a great job at JavaOne, in spite of the last code change coming in at 2 am the morning of the Keynote where Darkchat was to be announced and demoed in front of thousands. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. (BTW if you watch the video of the Keynote you can see (starting at 2:40) our own Chris Melissinos give a live demo of Darkchat! Ant, Mo, and I were in the second row holding our collective breaths.)

As with building anything you learn things along the way, tricks, patterns, traps to avoid, etc.. like always point the nail-gun away from your body. It was no different building the Darkchat server (except for the nail-gun thing). Since I already had experience working on a server with Snowman I thought I would have a good handle on what was needed for Darkchat. lol! A common answer, that I myself often give to the question "what is the best way to do x with Darkstar?" is, "it depends on the application". Well, Darkchat was different enough from Snowman that a whole new set of tricks had to be learned. I'm planning on sharing some on those in forthcoming posts so stay tuned.