Another year, 2026.
We had an exciting 2025, with lots of interesting work on complicated projects. Our focus remains the same as ever, helping clients with high performance, reliable, server systems on Windows and Linux. This year we will begin our 30th year of software development consultancy and, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The highlight of the year was probably Phase 2 of our server development for our large, American postal company.
We’re pleased to have resumed work with our nameless, large, American postal company, who, back in 2019 took our mail-sorting server software into an extended pilot programme. Things went well, they have over 300 servers running the software and are processing over 554 million pieces of mail a day, each one of which results in multiple messages processed by our server software. They now want us to fix a couple of issues and extend the system to support TLS.
Welcome to 2025.
2024 was a good year for us, we continued to work with the secretive Online Gaming Company adding to and improving the cloud gaming server that we wrote for them. It’s quite nice to have a client that uses our server code to support over 1.4 billion monthly players and to continue to extend and improve the code that we’ve now been a part of for over 16 years.
2021 was another “interesting” year. We hope that things worked out OK for you. We’ve stayed nice and busy doing the things we love to do. So lots more C++ on various platforms for various clients.
For us, and a few of our clients, 2021 was the year that NUMA really started to be a thing. Mostly, up until now, we’ve been able to ignore NUMA hardware. Most clients scale out across cheap hardware and we’re used to dealing with that.
The Linux port of The Server Framework is going really well and we now have investigated both libuv and epoll back ends. There’s still a lot of work to do before this will be something that we’re releasing generally but the client’s that are working with us on this are really excited by how well it’s going.
The massively modernised, and far in the future 7.0 release of The Server Framework will include the Linux changes and our 6.
We’re going to be really busy for the rest of the year as we’ve just won a large contract with our Industrial Control Client in Germany. We’ll be working on the systems that we’ve worked on for them before, adding new functionality and integrating The Server Framework into some applications that we haven’t worked on before.
The Linux port of The Server Framework is going really well and we now have a server and client system running on Linux using our custom reliable UDP network layer.
We’re currently working on a proof of concept Linux port of one of our more complex server systems for a client. This is interesting stuff and surprisingly easy. Most of our framework code ported pretty quickly and now runs nicely on a test Ubuntu 16.04 box as well as on Windows. We’re using CLion and CMake on Linux and this has provided a surprisingly familiar environment to work in. It’s very early days but things look good and I expect we’ll eventually do this work again properly and roll it out as part of The Server Framework.
This year is proving to be yet another busy one for us. We’ve continued to work with Eonic Gaming on their servers for the Turf Battles Triumphus 3D MMORPG and we have done quite a bit of work with various clients regarding hardening their TLS servers. The main focus though has been digging into WebRTC data channels.
The WebRTC work is nice, though fairly complex. It’s based on lots of RFCs and the initial learning curve was pretty steep.
We’ve been busy with lots of custom development work over the last few months. Working with Eonic Gaming on their server for the Turf Battles Triumphus 3D MMORPG. Working with one of our security company clients on their video streaming server, adding RTP over TCP and HLS streams to the RTP over UDP of the original design. Improving the performance and functionality of the pluggable server that we wrote for one of our other gaming clients as they scale out into the cloud.
We’re pleased to be working with one of our secretive security company clients again to provide a custom video streaming server for them. The server will enable them to record and stream live video from their network of “internet of things” connected devices.
As with all M2M and IoT projects this system needs to be able to scale to many thousands of concurrently connected devices and we’re pleased to be able to use The Server Framework’s new Streaming Media Option pack to be able to provide a complete solution quickly and cost effectively for our client.
