It's been too long since my last blog about FFB development, so high time for an update.

The good news up front: I'm still around and I am still working on Fantasy Football.

I've been moving house (about 500 km), however, due to changing my place of work (working for the same company) and whoever has any experience moving with a family of four (188 boxes of stuff) knows that keeps you busy for a bit.

I've refactored serializing objects from a bytecode (of my own design) to JSON, a rather tedious process that took many months to complete (fixing over a thousand compile time errors). This is of course only a first step along the way to move the client from Java to JavaScript. Persistence (the way games are stored) has changed completely, as well. The new (compressed) format uses a lot less space and will enable Christer to move backups over to cloud storage in the future. Next point on the agenda is moving the network protocol over to Websockets. Which will then be enough changes for releasing a version 1.1 (in Q1 2014).

Those of you using a newer Java version (Java 7) on their machines will have noticed an annoying "untrusted" popup whenever you start FFB. This is due to a change in policy by Oracle that may cause unsigned JNLPs (Java Web Start Applications) to be discontinued altogether in the future. We have addressed this by serving a signed JAR in the near future - Christer has bought an appropriate certificate already (which is an unnecessarily complicated and rather expensive process). Nothing will change for you as a user - you just need to accept the certificate once and won't see any more popups from then on.

That's it from me - keep on gaming!
Kalimar