BBGameZone Is Back

A few weeks ago BBGameZone vanished completely from the Internet. Most of the site was nothing to write about, but the forums were easily the number one resource for people developing or running PBBGs. It was also the site that ran the PBBG contest just last year so it was something of a surprise when the domain expired and it never seemed to come back...

However, it's back now. Apparently the fellow running it before isn't going to be doing so anymore, he will just participate as another user now. But all the forum data is back and the forums are up in a new home at BBGameZone.net. In a few weeks the grace period for renewing the old domain will have expired and we can hope that someone sympathetic to the site will end up with it, in which case the site will be moved back to its old address.

Google Rolls Out Another Language For App Engine

Back in one of my older posts (App Engine Is Going To Become A Better PBBG Host) I wrote about some of the upcoming changes Google is planning for their App Engine. Several of those improvements should be helpful for anyone who wants to try building a PBBG on the web and wants a scalable platform for deploying it.

Today they rolled out a different change for App Engine by releasing an early look at Java on the platform. If you would rather use Java instead of Python, today is your lucky day. I do love me some Java but I can't say I'm a big fan of it for web app development, for that I think Rails is a much better choice. Nevertheless, Java is a massively popular language and a lot of people know it. It was definitely my third choice for them to implement.

Edited 04/09/2008:

It turns out that in addition to the Java rollout (only for the first 10,000 developers to sign up for early access) they also rolled out three new features, chief among them is a cron like capability. Since that is a key need for a lot of PBBGs I thought I'd mention it.