Posts Tagged ‘open source’

Firebase CE – What’s next?

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 by larsan

So, we’ve released Firebase Community Edition. Now there’s a Java game server which is open source and available to be used. Now what?

Well, here’s what! There’s a couple of things we’d like to get out of the door immediately and some of them will start appearing soon indeed:

  • Script support: Java 6 has build in support for JavaScript and can be extended to support a rather large list of script engines. We’d like to add support for writing your game using any of these script languages. We’d love to see the first Ruby+Flash game out there!
  • IDE support: We already have proto code for some Eclipse plugins lying about, and these should be polished up and released. Of course, you can always use our Maven archetypes and plugins, and then import into Eclipse, but direct support would be nice too. Of course, if anyone want to use NetBeans weed have to figure out something for you to eh?
  • Documentation: It’s sparse at the moment and needs to be fleshed out. We hope you’d like to help us here by simply telling us what is missing and asking us about all those things weäve forgotten to write down. Or indeed wasn’t explained properly.
  • IoC support: This is a biggy. Again we have proto code for for Guice lying about which needs to be fixed and published, but obviously we need to add direct support for Spring as well. Actually, you can write your components in Guice now but you’d have to wire it together yourself. Spring needs to be tested, so let us get back to you on that, ok?

And that’s what we want to do the immediate future. Watch this space, this is going to be fun!

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FCE: The Upgrade Path

Monday, December 7th, 2009 by larsan

So if you write your game with Firebase Community Edition (FCE), what happends then? After all, writing a nice game and getting players is only the first step on the journey. Well, basically this is what we’re thinking (and the information here should be taken with a pinch of salt, we’re still thinking).

If  you have a sucessfull game on FCE but don’t wan’t to share your source code? There’ll be a Firebase Standard Edition (FSE), identical to the FCE with the exception of a proprietary license.

How about scalability? Well, if you want to, you can sticky-balance sessions across multiple single instances, so in theory you can scale both FCE and FSE, but if you want scalability and high availability included, you can upgrade to the Firebase Enterprise Edition which gives you the entire package.

  • FCE -> (success, a couple of thousand players, limited budget) -> FSE
  • FCE -> (success, a lot of players, in need of scalability) -> FEE
  • FSE -> (success, needs HA and scalability) -> FEE

In terms of support, there’ll be an entire range of options, starting from the Basic Support which will offer a ticketing system for bugs, API and maintenance questions, all the way up to Enterprise Support with full telephone support, dedicated personnel, dedicated development branch and customizes hot-patches etc. But I’ll go through those in a separate post. Stay tuned!

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Firebase Community Edition

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 by larsan

So what can you expect from the Community Edition (FCE)? Here’s a basic rundown:

  • It’ll be free and open source under the AGPL license. This means you can use, modify and even redistribute it to your hearts delight. However, you can’t change the copyright, nor the license itself. Also, there’s this viral GPL thing going on…
  • It’s limited to a single server. Sounds too restricted to you? Well, we’ve run thousands and thousands of players of single, rather cheap, servers so we’re not too concerned. Try it!
  • Performance! Basically FCE is an optimized single server version of the Enterprise Edition. While perhaps not your 1st choise for first person shooters, the FCE boasts a very low latency indeed. Not to mention the parallel event execution and the transparent transactions and so on.
  • Community support will be available. Forums, wikis etc.
  • There’s a clear upgrade path for you. Do you have a lot of players and you’re getting edgy about uptime? There’s the Enterprise Edition just waiting for you. Want more support? Sure. Scalability up to high heaven? Sure. Want a cherry on top? We’ll see what we can do…

I mean, seriously: The industry’s best and sexiest game server, for free?! It’ll be cool!

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What’s this Open Source Thingy?

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 by larsan

Yesterday we silently let slip that we’re open sourcing Firebase. It is a major change of direction and we are very excited about the whole thing.

So Firebase, which has been under a closed proprietary licens only so far, will now be split into three distinct versions:

  • Firebase Community Edition – Open source under the AGPL license. This version is a single server only version, but is otherwise feature complete.
  • Firebase Standard Edition  – A proprietary license version of the cummunity edition. Still a single server only version but under a proprietary licens.
  • Firebase Enterprise Edition – All the bells and whistles of the current Firebase version. This includes transparent clustering, fail-over safety, rolling cluster updates, unlimited scalability and so on.

Confusing? Stay tuned, over the next couple of days and weeks I’ll post the details here. Exciting times ahead!

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