Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Joel Reymont is writing an interesting series of articles on how he achieves scalability, fault tolerance and load balancing with his Open Poker server. The server is written using Erlang and Joel seems to be looking at how the same approach can be used to write highly scalable MMORPG systems. The Open Poker code has been made open source under a dual GPL/commercial license. 2:04:39 PM

The Gwydion Dylan group have announced the release of 'Open Dylan' 1.0 beta. This is the open source release of what used to be a commercial Dylan development system called 'Functional Developer'. The release was announced on the gd-hackers mailing list: we're glad to be able to announce the release of Open Dylan 1.0beta1: Open Dylan is an open source implementation of the Dylan programming language, plus a large number of assorted libraries. Most of the code had once been developed by a company called Harlequin, for a product called DylanWorks in the beginning, and Harlequin Dylan later. After Harlequin demised, some of the programmers acquired the rights, and kept selling the development environment under the name of Functional Developer. Eventually, to the joy of the Dylan community, they decided to release all of their source code under an open source license. What you can download at http://www.opendylan.org/downloads/opendylan/ is the attempt of a group of enthusiasts calling themselves the "Dylan Hackers" (that's us :) ) to bundle up this code, and publish it in a form useful for the general public. This is release 1.0beta1, the first public release of Open Dylan. Naturally, we expect this release to have bugs. We're interested in getting your feedback, in order to improve this product. Downloads are available for Linux/x86 and Windows. 12:47:05 PM

Slashdot is reporting on the winners of the 2005 ICFP programming contest. The 'Dylan Hackers' team came 2nd and also won the judges prize. Well done! 12:44:38 PM