BioWare Announces Open-Source Orbit Project

An anonymous reader writes BioWare, part of EA Games, have announced Orbit, their first open-source project. Orbit is a Java based framework for building distributed online services including a virtual actors system (based on Microsoft's Orleans project) and a lightweight inversion of control container. The announcement says, in part, Beginning today, we will be making Orbit open source on GitHub under a BSD license. We have been leveraging open source technology internally for quite some time, and we think the time is now right for us to give back and engage with the community in a more meaningful way. The last-generation of Orbit powered some of the key technology behind the Dragon Age Keep and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Our plans for the next-generation framework are even more ambitious.

Comments

Re:Why empathize that it's Java?

[abies]

You can call java from other environments, it is just not trivial - and you will need spawn parts of jvm inside your process.

It is also not trivial to call into C++ library which uses a lot of STL goodness in its API from some of languages. Basically, it is just plain C which got very good and easy compatibility in every language out there - and you end up with a lot of C++ libraries doing poor-man extern "C" interfaces just to make compatibility easier.

But the real answer I think is - nobody wants to. If you have your golden framework in java, there is nothing forcing you to endure C++ anymore ;)