Getting started with Project Darkstar is no small undertaking.  The rewards are high, but like all great technologies it does take some time and effort to come up to speed with this new online game architecture.  Those developers who lean into that learning curve and start building a few Project Darkstar based applications usually reach the conclusion that Darkstar is very cool. :-)  Thankfully, there are a wealth of resources to help both the newbie and the more experienced Darkstar developer get to that point and achieve all of their online game goals.  The Project Darkstar Forums is often the place developers come to looking for answers and that's a friendly option and a great place to begin.   Another winning idea is to browse the resources on the new Project Darkstar Tutorials wiki.  It's stacked to the brim with information to help developers navigate through the entire process of installing, running, and developing applications for Project Darkstar.  Recently published and leveraging the common experience of our more seasoned community members, the Tutorials wiki is a great place to get you going.

One highlight of this new resource is the public availability of the Project Darkstar Hands on Lab presented at JavaOne 2009.  In the Project Snowman: Developing a 3D Multiplayer Game Using Project Darkstar hands on lab participants learn about the process of building a 3D, multiplayer, capture-the-flag style snowball fighting game from the ground up using Project Darkstar.  This lab is a great opportunity for anyone to get up to speed quickly with Project Darkstar.  It covers installation, running the server and clients, message protocol, managed objects, managed references, channels, message processing, logins, matchmaking, chat, and more.  That's just a taste of the many resources available on the Tutorials wiki, so, borrowing the title of the hit song by the Black Eyed Peas... Let's get it started.

And lastly... speaking of JavaOne, our very own Owen Kellett was interviewed at the conference by the editor for java.net, Kevin Farnham.  In this community corner podcast, Owen discusses Project Darkstar technology topics ranging from latency and durability tradeoffs to write caching and transparent scalability.  Tune in to get the skinny on the recent developments from the land of Project Darkstar.