We’ve now reached the end of the recent embedded development project for our Industrial Control Client.
The final phase was made more complicated by the difficulty in debugging the changes. The embedded hardware had no screen, and the network debug facility that it supported was unreliable; it sometimes just lost messages. So the first step was to work around this issue with some debug messages in-line with the normal TCP/IP data channel from the hardware.
The second of our “reanimation” projects has reached a significant milestone. We ran the whole new system on the real hardware last week, and it mostly works. This is a big step for us and the client as the project has been quite complex in terms of how the development has been done.
As I said, our secret Industrial Control Client has had us working on a program that compiles in Visual C++ 6 on an XP VM.
We recently had an old client contact us with an unusual request. We last worked with VEXIS Systems Inc. back in 2010 when we extended the telephony server we’d built for them to support CLR hosting, using The Server Framework’s CLR Hosting Option. We then built a managed plugin system that integrated with the existing unmanaged system so that they could write their business logic in either unmanaged code or in a managed language such as C#.
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.
2020 was probably a challenging year for everyone. We were especially lucky in that all of our loved ones managed to stay safe and healthy and our working style was easy to adjust to fit with the various challenges of the year. We hope that things worked out OK for you too.
We ended up having a fairly good year. The games companies using The Server Framework were busy and had lots of work to send our way.
Wow. Things are going from strength to strength here at JetByte. As ever we have lots of games companies using The Server Framework and they tend to push us more than our finance clients ever did. Our secretive Online Gaming Company now has more than 400 million players per month on their cloud hosted server system and we’re still developing the native C++ side of this for them. It’s matured into a stable and flexible system and they just keep on pushing it in new directions.
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.
We’re pleased to be working with Eonic Gaming in the development of the server for their Turf Battles Triumphus 3D MMORPG.
Eonic have selected us to replace their existing networking code with The Server Framework to improve the stability and performance of their server.
