gzochi 0.3 is out -- go get it! The big news in this release is that there's much more scalable and robust support for transaction execution: transactions can time out, get rolled back, and then get retried automatically. This was the functionality that I was most eager / most scared to add to the server, and the fact that it's there and works predictably and quickly is a major confidence boost. The only thing that's missing at this point from, say, a minimum viable product point of view is support for preiodic task scheduling. And I'll be working on that shortly.
Another thing that I think is really significant in this release (even though it's not much code) is the addition of the GLib-compatible reference client, which is something I've wanted to add since starting work on the first gzochi example game. Being able to hook callbacks into a
select
loop (or something similar) is just so much neater, more predictable, and easier to debug than launching a new independent thread to govern, say, your communication with a server, and having to worry about its interactions with other threads in your application. Weirdly enough, I think this is something that I started to appreciate more fully after writing (and re-writing) multi-step client-server interactions in JavaScript.As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have indeed begun to start building some actual personal projects on top of gzochi. I don't have anything to show for it yet, except that I've been exposed to a fascinating array of problems that belong to the domain of rich client development: Rendering pipelines, dirty rectangles.