On Jul 20, 2006, at 12:31 AM, Tom Wilson wrote: I was a little confused about what REST is, so I looked it up. Yes. This is correct. REST means Representational State Transfer. Let's deconstruct that a bit. A representation is a way of encoding some data. For example, HTML, XML, _javascript_ JSON, and a screenshot (a series of binary pixels) of a rendered HTML page are all representations of some data somewhere. State is a word that programmers use to mean a condition that an object is in at a particular instant in time. Transfer refers to the act of moving a representation of state from one machine (our servers) to another (your machine, or a proxy). That's all, really. In order to find out about the second life world, you are going to request the transfer of representations of server-side state. Is this going to eventually completely replace the protocol that the SL viewer uses to communicate with the servers, or is this going to be a secondary protocol that we would use for data exchange with third-party applications? No, this is not going to completely replace the UDP protocol. While expressing, fetching, and mutating state using REST is useful for some applications (for example, creating an HTML page containing a list of land for sale) it is not appropriate for real-time unreliable updates. Movement updates, object manipulation, and other operations where there is a continuous stream of updates and once the viewer's "simulation time" has passed where the event was will continue to be expressed using the existing UDP protocol (hopefully improved to be less fragile in the face of message template changes). The other thing that I'm now curious about is whether we'd be able to interact with SL without actually showing an avatar. Sending IM's, transfering items, or looking at the various lists really are independent of the simulator. It would be nice if we could connect our third-party programs in a "sim-less" state for tasks that don't require interaction with the visible part of the SL grid. Yes, this is one of our most important long-term goals, and is a large motivator behind moving to this architecture. [ Forgive me if that sounded dumb or weird. It's late, so stuff is just coming out of my brain without the usual filters. :-) ] Not at all, you brought up a number of very important points :-) Donovan |
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