Yeah, that is recent, they have had Origins out for over a year. Friends of mine were indirectly involved in what lead to Origins being a thing. Someone discovered you can just run Shockwave as a standalone executable. The developer leading the efforts for Origins was also iconic in the Habbo reverse engineering scene, where players would recreate the back-end server. He was known as Myrax back then. ;)
As for that IRC... was it Totov? or... and I don't recall if Jordan had one with Habbo stuff or not...
Java makes it sound like you're talking about Totov where Blunk was born by Nillus and Office.Boy after Nillus coding up two or three C# based emulators.