RedDwarf Server is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 middleware solution for developing the server-side

Server-side

Server-side refers to operations that are performed by the server in a client–server relationship in computer networking.Typically, a server is a software program, such as a web server, that runs on a remote server, reachable from a user's local computer or workstation...

 of massively multiplayer online game

Massively multiplayer online game

A massively multiplayer online game is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet, and usually feature at least one persistent world. They are, however, not necessarily games played on...

s. It is the official community fork of Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar was an open source MMOG middleware solution written in Java by the Project Darkstar team at Sun Microsystems. It was a research project headed by Sun Microsystems engineer Jim Waldo that was publicly released on August 30, 2007, and "aims to help developers and operators avoid a...

, an open-source project supported and managed by Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

. Upon Oracle

Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

's acquisition of Sun, support for Project Darkstar was stopped. To continue development of the project, the community rebranded the latest codebase of Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar was an open source MMOG middleware solution written in Java by the Project Darkstar team at Sun Microsystems. It was a research project headed by Sun Microsystems engineer Jim Waldo that was publicly released on August 30, 2007, and "aims to help developers and operators avoid a...

's repositories and released it as RedDwarf Server.

Client API

Clients can communicate with the server using a Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 or C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 API. The community has also released client APIs for additional platforms including C#, Python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

, Objective-C

Objective-C

Objective-C is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language.Today, it is used primarily on Apple's Mac OS X and iOS: two environments derived from the OpenStep standard, though not compliant with it...

, and ActionScript

ActionScript

ActionScript is an object-oriented language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. . It is a dialect of ECMAScript , and is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of...

.

Protocol

RedDwarf Server uses a built-in protocol for network communications. This protocol, currently limited to TCP

Transmission Control Protocol

The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP...

communications, is outlined in RedDwarf's server documentation.

License

"RedDwarf is continuing with an identical licensing scheme as Project Darkstar. RedDwarf server is distributed under GPLv2 with the server APIs being made specially available under GPLv2 + classpath exception. The Java client and the C client APIs available as part of the RedDwarf project are distributed under a BSD license."