Development Update

It's been quite a while since our last blog post, and while our Discord server is our primary channel for development updates we'd like to have more blog content too. Our lack of blog posts is not due to a lack of development activity - to the contrary, it's because all of our time outside of our monthly Meetup sessions goes to development! We've been busy working on both the core MyWorld code and a number of auxiliary libraries that are used in MyWorld but developed as separate codebases (most of which are already open source) in the hopes that they'll be useful to other projects as well.

We'll be posting more about these soon, but in the meantime here's a high-level overview of what a few of the things we've been working on:

• Chipmunk has seen extensive performance and codebase hygeine improvements.
• Spruce is a lightweight facade for JDBC that makes it easy to interact with vanilla JDBC code with modern, concise code styles.
• Obsidian (and Obsidian-jME for using Obsidian in jMonkeyEngine) is a modern GUI framework designed for high-performance embedded uses. It uses Skia for graphics (the same 2D rendering engine used in the Chrome browser), FlexBox (via Yoga) for layout, completely separates UI logic from rendering, and borrows a number of reactivity and logical state -> rendering state synchronization concepts from React and other modern UI frameworks.
• Buoy is a high-level wrapper and object mapping library that makes interacting with native code via the (currently preview) JDK Project Panama much easier, cleaner, and safer than hand-written Panama code or automatically extracted bindings.

In the coming weeks and months we'll be posting more about some of these projects, as well as giving some development updates about MyWorld itself. If you'd like to hear more about what we're up to without waiting for blog posts, come join us on Discord! See you around!