Nabble - Massiv

IMPORTANT INFORMATION - Transition from ObjectWeb to OW2

2006-12-21T09:03:41Z

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

Dear ObjectWeb members and partners,

ObjectWeb is about to undergo the biggest evolution since its foundation as
a consortium in 2002 by Bull, France Telecom and INRIA.

* ObjectWeb: Success and Evolution

The ObjectWeb story started somewhere around Grenoble in the Alp
mountains in the late 90's and now spans the whole planet with active
participation of members from several European countries to China to the
United States to Brazil. Over the last 5 years, our community experienced
tremendous growth, now counting over 70 corporate members, over 700
committers, thousands of individual members and contributors from many
countries in all continents. Our middleware code base counts over a hundred
projects for a total of tens of million lines of open source code.

This phase of growth brought new opportunities and new challenges. In order
to better address them, the Board of Directors decided in early 2005 to start
a task force with the mission of evaluating possible scenarios and
implementing the most suitable of them. This mission code-named
ObjectWeb v2 has been successful due to major commitment of
ObjectWebs community. As a result, it was decided to make the transition
from the current organization, namely a consortium hosted by INRIA, to a full-
fledged, non-profit independent legal entity. This new entity, whose bylaws
have been approved by ObjectWeb's Board of Directors, will be incepted in
January 2007 under the French law as a non-profit association headquartered
in Brussels, Belgium.

* Creation of OW2: a Nonprofit Legal Entity

The new organization is registered under the name OW2 Consortium or OW2
for short. This new name is the result of ObjectWeb and OrientWare joining
their forces to build a global and powerful
alliance. After extensive consultation
of the community, its rules of operation have been defined on the following
principles:

- enhanced commitment from the members through three levels of membership:
Strategic, Corporate and Individual
- deliberate market awareness with the underlying rationale to bridge the gap
between enterprise developers and users
- a refined governance model promoting increased participation from the
community, with three councils addressing technology, ecosystem
development and operations
- possibilities to create local chapters so as to facilitate international
development in a decentralized way

* In Practice: What to Expect, What Actions to Take

The ObjectWeb consortium agreement is ending on December 31, 2006. OW2
Consortium is starting on January 1, 2007. Current members are warmly invited
to join OW2 but memberships will not be automatically transferred. For this
reason, it is very important that ObjectWeb members take the necessary actions
to join the OW2 Consortium. Strategic and corporate members joining OW2 in
the first quarter of year 2007, be them former
ObjectWeb members or not, will be
deemed Co-Founders of the association.

Joining OW2 will most likely require the
involvement of your legal department. All
necessary legal documents will be available online shortly and additional
information is available on request. As CEO of the association, Cedric Thomas
will lead the operations and be your main contact
for all practical information.

No personal information will be transferred from ObjectWeb to OW2 without the
explicit consent of the user. A simplified
procedure will be put in place so that
registered members and users of the ObjectWeb
online facility can opt-in to have
their personal information transferred to the
association. Details are to be sent on
all ObjectWeb mailing lists shortly.

From now on, new membership and new project submission will no longer be
accepted by ObjectWeb. However in the short term the ObjectWeb web site and
Forge will be kept up and running, so project and
community activities be carried
on without interruption.

We want to thank you all for having made OW2 Consortium possible. We are
now counting on you to make it an even better
place for great projects. We invite
you all, developers, researchers, open source
enthusiasts from over the world, to
participate in this new and exciting endeavor.
Last but not least, we would like to
take advantage of this message to present you our most sincere season's
greetings and wish you the best for year 2007. And long live OW2!

With warmest regards,

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Jean Pierre Laisné ObjectWeb Chairman
François Letellier ObjectWeb Executive Director

François LETELLIER
INRIA Rhône-Alpes - ObjectWeb Project Director
email: francois.letellier at inria.fr - cell: +33
(0)6 84 64 00 24 - Skype: francois.letellier
blog: http://os3g.blogspot.com/

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From forum: Massiv - Users

IMPORTANT INFORMATION - Transition from ObjectWeb to OW2

2006-12-21T09:03:41Z

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

Dear ObjectWeb members and partners,

ObjectWeb is about to undergo the biggest evolution since its foundation as
a consortium in 2002 by Bull, France Telecom and INRIA.

* ObjectWeb: Success and Evolution

The ObjectWeb story started somewhere around Grenoble in the Alp
mountains in the late 90's and now spans the whole planet with active
participation of members from several European countries to China to the
United States to Brazil. Over the last 5 years, our community experienced
tremendous growth, now counting over 70 corporate members, over 700
committers, thousands of individual members and contributors from many
countries in all continents. Our middleware code base counts over a hundred
projects for a total of tens of million lines of open source code.

This phase of growth brought new opportunities and new challenges. In order
to better address them, the Board of Directors decided in early 2005 to start
a task force with the mission of evaluating possible scenarios and
implementing the most suitable of them. This mission code-named
ObjectWeb v2 has been successful due to major commitment of
ObjectWebs community. As a result, it was decided to make the transition
from the current organization, namely a consortium hosted by INRIA, to a full-
fledged, non-profit independent legal entity. This new entity, whose bylaws
have been approved by ObjectWeb's Board of Directors, will be incepted in
January 2007 under the French law as a non-profit association headquartered
in Brussels, Belgium.

* Creation of OW2: a Nonprofit Legal Entity

The new organization is registered under the name OW2 Consortium or OW2
for short. This new name is the result of ObjectWeb and OrientWare joining
their forces to build a global and powerful
alliance. After extensive consultation
of the community, its rules of operation have been defined on the following
principles:

- enhanced commitment from the members through three levels of membership:
Strategic, Corporate and Individual
- deliberate market awareness with the underlying rationale to bridge the gap
between enterprise developers and users
- a refined governance model promoting increased participation from the
community, with three councils addressing technology, ecosystem
development and operations
- possibilities to create local chapters so as to facilitate international
development in a decentralized way

* In Practice: What to Expect, What Actions to Take

The ObjectWeb consortium agreement is ending on December 31, 2006. OW2
Consortium is starting on January 1, 2007. Current members are warmly invited
to join OW2 but memberships will not be automatically transferred. For this
reason, it is very important that ObjectWeb members take the necessary actions
to join the OW2 Consortium. Strategic and corporate members joining OW2 in
the first quarter of year 2007, be them former
ObjectWeb members or not, will be
deemed Co-Founders of the association.

Joining OW2 will most likely require the
involvement of your legal department. All
necessary legal documents will be available online shortly and additional
information is available on request. As CEO of the association, Cedric Thomas
will lead the operations and be your main contact
for all practical information.

No personal information will be transferred from ObjectWeb to OW2 without the
explicit consent of the user. A simplified
procedure will be put in place so that
registered members and users of the ObjectWeb
online facility can opt-in to have
their personal information transferred to the
association. Details are to be sent on
all ObjectWeb mailing lists shortly.

From now on, new membership and new project submission will no longer be
accepted by ObjectWeb. However in the short term the ObjectWeb web site and
Forge will be kept up and running, so project and
community activities be carried
on without interruption.

We want to thank you all for having made OW2 Consortium possible. We are
now counting on you to make it an even better
place for great projects. We invite
you all, developers, researchers, open source
enthusiasts from over the world, to
participate in this new and exciting endeavor.
Last but not least, we would like to
take advantage of this message to present you our most sincere season's
greetings and wish you the best for year 2007. And long live OW2!

With warmest regards,

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Jean Pierre Laisné ObjectWeb Chairman
François Letellier ObjectWeb Executive Director

François LETELLIER
INRIA Rhône-Alpes - ObjectWeb Project Director
email: francois.letellier at inria.fr - cell: +33
(0)6 84 64 00 24 - Skype: francois.letellier
blog: http://os3g.blogspot.com/

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From forum: Massiv - Dev

Re: Background Informations about Massiv

2006-10-13T11:07:46Z

Hello Jens,

> Hopefully I can still reach somebody responsible for the Massiv Project
> with this email, because I am
> interested in some background informations about the project or even better
> the tool itself. I already checked the internet and of course your website
> as the open middelware site, too

I am one of the former Massiv developers and can possibly answer some of your
questions.

> What I am looking for is for example some science papers or some articles
> published in various magazines.

I do not think there are any or at least I am not aware of them. Certainly no
one from the original team has written any. There are some technical
materials in the documentation folder in the Massiv sources, but they are
written mostly in Czech.

> The informations I need are like
> - How do you get the idea for the project?

We formulated our basic goals (to develop a distributed game engine), looked
at other competing projects and technologies to find out what ideas could be
stolen or what could be done better and planned the rough sketch of the
project. The initial phase of planning (2000-2001) took us something like 1
year, but we were not working much hard. We were considering many different
technologies, such as distributed transactions, distributed memory and
scripting languages but finally decided to program the whole thing in C++ and
base the model on distributed objects and the proposed object model.

Before we started coding anything (2001) we had already known what the object
model would look like, that the objects would be able to migrate and
replicate, the migration would be used for message passing (event
scheduling), the objects could be grouped to migration and replication
groups, knew the policy for assigning object identifications and developed
the archivation protocol and the consistency rules. However what was not
known at that point were the implementation aspects of certain concepts, such
as how the membership of objects to migration/replication groups would be
exactly defined (later on, we decided that this would be driven by object
references), how object properties would be defined and implemented, etc.

We started coding the common "neutral" things like logger, statuses and
network first (2001) and further developed our plans for the implementation
of the object model. Then (2002) we started working on objects, properties
and pointers, decided to implement garbage collector and migration protocol.
During this phase we had not had any IDL language at all and had to
describe "managed" classes programatically by calling various register-like
API on objects. This was really bothersome and so a simple IDL language +
compiler, considered as a temporary solution, were developed to test object
migration when the migration protocol was finished at the end of 2002 (object
archivation was done by that time too). In 2003, the ideas of incremental
object replication protocol were finalized and Stepan started working on it.
A brand new IDL language and compiler were implemented in the meantime to
overcome the limitations of the temporary IDL language and the work on the
demo application began. The rest of 2003 was devoted to the development of
the demo, fixing bugs in the core (mostly replication, archivation & related)
and preparing for the release.

In 2004 we fixed the remaining bugs, finished the Demo application, prepared
the graphics and submitted the project for approval.

> - How was the respond of the project?

I think there were quite a lot of people interested in using Massiv in their
projects but the learning curve is somewhat steep. That means you have got to
learn a lot of things regarding the model before you can actually start
coding anything or have something up and running. However, once you got past
that point, it should be quite easy to use Massiv. Our goal was to integrate
the model with C++ as much as possible and automate most of the things so
that it would be easy to use and it would be used in the way it is natural
for C++ programmers (remember how the mapping of CORBA to C++ looks like? It
is completely unusable). This justifies certain implementation aspects, such
as the use of garbage collector, etc.

Since the project is complex, it requires a fairly solid knowledge of the C++
language, including the paradigms of STL, certain programming skills and the
knowledge of distributed systems paradigms. It certainly can not be used by
novices. However we believe that if one is experienced enough to write an own
network-based game engine, such an individual is capable of understanding how
the problems that they have to face in their game engine are abstracted in
Massiv and how easily they can be solved by using our framework.

> - Does anybody still work on the tool?

Unfortunatelly no. It would be nice if we could find new
maintainers/developers.

There were some problems regarding the compilation of Massiv under newer C++
compilers in the past two years. Until now, the project could not be compiled
on anything better than MSVC 7.0 (.NET 2002) or GCC 3.2 and relied on an
ancient unsupported version of the CryptoPP library that was used for
cryptography.

These compilers are outdated and it might be one of the reasons why we do not
have such a big publicity as we wished to have. I am now working with Stepan
on bringing the project up to date with the C++ standards so that it could be
compiled at least by MSVC 7.1 and 8 as well as GCC 3.4.4 and 4.x or newer and
so that it would work with the most recent version of CryptoPP. This work is
mostly done, the only thing that remains to be done is to verify the
compilation under GCC 4.x.

-- Marek

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From forum: Massiv - Dev

Background Informations about Massiv

2006-10-13T03:44:36Z

Good day,

my name is Jens Michel, and I am studying Information Systems at the
University of Muenster in Germany.
In the frame of the informatik seminar with the theme "Shared Realtime
Systems" it is my task to analyze the
Massiv Tool.

Hopefully I can still reach somebody responsible for the Massiv Project with
this email, because I am
interested in some background informations about the project or even better
the tool itself. I already checked the internet and of course your website
as the open middelware site, too.

What I am looking for is for example some science papers or some articles
published in various magazines.

The informations I need are like
- How do you get the idea for the project?
- How was the respond of the project?
- Does anybody still work on the tool?

It would be great if you could help me.

Regards
_________________________________________
Jens Michel
ICQ#: 137676825
Mobile: +49 (0)176 21243408
Phone: +49 (0)251 838 10611

_________________________________________

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From forum: Massiv - Dev

Re: Fwd: implementing object system with CORBA

2005-08-24T10:19:53Z

>Massiv core features seems promising. What's its status now? Is it
>still under development by others than David Li?

Nobody is working on the project as far as I know. I can not speak for the
David Li's team but haven't seen anything from him yet.
-- Markoid

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From forum: Massiv - Dev

Re: Fwd: implementing object system with CORBA

2005-08-21T19:20:10Z

Hi, Marek:

I see it. Thank you for your comments.

Massiv core features seems promising. What's its status now? Is it
still under development by others than David Li?

Regards
Derek

On 8/22/05, Marek Vondrak <markoid@...> wrote:

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> Hello.
>
> The primary reason is that it was our school assignment to write such a
> system. The other reasons are that we do not find CORBA suitable for the
> development of massively multiplayer games. If you know CORBA I believe you
> will agree with the following arguments. Basically, what a MMO developer
> wants, is not a RPC only system like CORBA or DCOM, but requires at least
> some support for object state serialization and replication, so that the
> simulation could be presented to clients. Support for consistent simulation
> archivation is required on the server side. Not any of these requirements
> can be fulfilled with basic CORBA, because ORB cores do know nothing about
> CORBA object structures but their interfaces (except for so called CORBA
> value types, in other words ORBs can not serialize objects, can not access
> their attributes, etc. but can only call object methods through published
> interfaces). Also since MMO game components are usually written in a single
> language (mostly C++), it is highly encouraged to use that middleware that
> integrates with that particular language as much as possible so that
> programmers are not forced to write akward (unnatural) code. CORBA, on the
> other side, is a multilanguage middleware and is "mapped" to multiple
> languages (OMG standard defines how CORBA objects described by IDL have to
> be coded in that particular language). I reckon you would agree with me that
> CORBA mapping to C++ is _horrible_ and unusable.
> But enough. If you are still not convinced, try comparing the list of
> features supported by CORBA and Massiv side by side and try to answer to the
> following questions "Do I really need to use this CORBA feature in my MMO
> game?", "Is it useful to have Massiv core do this thing for me
> automatically?", "Can this Massiv feature be ever supported by ORB core or
> do I have to implement it myself on the application level?". Maybe you
> should look at the sources of the Demo (the "managed" part, say
> src/demo/lib/server) to see how a MMO game can be written in Massiv and what
> (little) differences there would be if the game was written as a single
> stand-alone (not distributed) application.
> However to be faithful I have to say that most people failed building the
> demo application if anything or were discouraged from using Massiv due to
> its complexity. As it is with all middlewares I have seen, one has to get
> acquainted with the guts of the middleware in order to write even the
> tiniest "hello world" application on top of it. Usually, the initialization
> part is the most complex one and requires the knowledge of the whole system.
> However I still believe that Massiv might be useful for those people how are
> fluent in modern C++, are qualified enough to write a simple network-based
> game without the use of a network middleware and can understand how the
> principles used in their network game are abstracted in Massiv.
>
> -- Markoid
>
>
>
>

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From forum: Massiv - Dev

Re: Fwd: implementing object system with CORBA

2005-08-21T16:29:20Z

Hi,

How about implementing the massiv managed object system with CORBA in
the first place? I mean why the massiv developers chose to design
their own? Thanks

Derek

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Hello.

The primary reason is that it was our school assignment to write such a
system. The other reasons are that we do not find CORBA suitable for the
development of massively multiplayer games. If you know CORBA I believe you
will agree with the following arguments. Basically, what a MMO developer
wants, is not a RPC only system like CORBA or DCOM, but requires at least
some support for object state serialization and replication, so that the
simulation could be presented to clients. Support for consistent simulation
archivation is required on the server side. Not any of these requirements
can be fulfilled with basic CORBA, because ORB cores do know nothing about
CORBA object structures but their interfaces (except for so called CORBA
value types, in other words ORBs can not serialize objects, can not access
their attributes, etc. but can only call object methods through published
interfaces). Also since MMO game components are usually written in a single
language (mostly C++), it is highly encouraged to use that middleware that
integrates with that particular language as much as possible so that
programmers are not forced to write akward (unnatural) code. CORBA, on the
other side, is a multilanguage middleware and is "mapped" to multiple
languages (OMG standard defines how CORBA objects described by IDL have to
be coded in that particular language). I reckon you would agree with me that
CORBA mapping to C++ is _horrible_ and unusable.
But enough. If you are still not convinced, try comparing the list of
features supported by CORBA and Massiv side by side and try to answer to the
following questions "Do I really need to use this CORBA feature in my MMO
game?", "Is it useful to have Massiv core do this thing for me
automatically?", "Can this Massiv feature be ever supported by ORB core or
do I have to implement it myself on the application level?". Maybe you
should look at the sources of the Demo (the "managed" part, say
src/demo/lib/server) to see how a MMO game can be written in Massiv and what
(little) differences there would be if the game was written as a single
stand-alone (not distributed) application.
However to be faithful I have to say that most people failed building the
demo application if anything or were discouraged from using Massiv due to
its complexity. As it is with all middlewares I have seen, one has to get
acquainted with the guts of the middleware in order to write even the
tiniest "hello world" application on top of it. Usually, the initialization
part is the most complex one and requires the knowledge of the whole system.
However I still believe that Massiv might be useful for those people how are
fluent in modern C++, are qualified enough to write a simple network-based
game without the use of a network middleware and can understand how the
principles used in their network game are abstracted in Massiv.

-- Markoid

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From forum: Massiv - Dev

Fwd: implementing object system with CORBA

2005-08-15T21:23:44Z

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Derek <pc1500@...>
Date: Aug 16, 2005 11:20 AM
Subject: implementing object system with CORBA
To: massiv-devel@...

Hi,

How about implementing the massiv managed object system with CORBA in
the first place? I mean why the massiv developers chose to design
their own? Thanks

Derek

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From forum: Massiv - Dev