Project Darkstar was an open source MMOG middleware solution written in Java. Project Darkstar began as a personal project of Jeff Kesselman in 1999. It later became a research project at Sun Microsystems, and aimed to "help developers and operators avoid a range of serious, yet typical, problems associated with massive scale online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications today, including zone overloading, data corruption, and server underutilization." February 2, 2010, Oracle shut down the project, and a community fork has been made called RedDwarf Server.