Hello I have tried to collect a viewepoint from MXP perspective to the OpenSimulator UGAIM architecture discussion. This text is based on the discussion on this list and on formulation of an overall picture using MXP terminology. I would like to hear your comments. Have I understood things correctly and written it in understandable form? Is there problems or mistakes on how I wrote the things down?
When we had the previous MXP version ready our conclusion was that we needed some serious contribution from OpenSimulator to help fill in the blank spots. I am happy to say that both technical details and missing architecture areas have come to focus as a result of working with OpenSimulator and reading this list. Identity Management Identity management, authenticaton and authorization are well established areas. Identities are managed by open identity providers. Participant identity consists of identity provider URI and participant UUID. Participant may authenticate to identity provider by any means available. Identity provider hands out one time tokens to participant. These tokens are then used to to authenticate to bubbles and other services. Bubbles and other services verify the tokens by invoking verification requests to the identity provider. See OpenId and OAuth for detailed description. Inventory Management Inventories are analogous to remote file systems with metadata support. User has own directory where data can be stored. The inventory service is not bound to identity provider or home bubble but can be freely acquired from any compliant provider. Each user and user group can have zero to many inventories. If no inventory is available for user it is not possible to store data to inventory. Asset Management Asset management, storage and delivery are challenging from ideological, theoretical and engineering view points. MXP is not an asset delivery protocol. In ideological level it is enough to state that any asset can easily be extracted with a specialized client. Because of this there is no feasible technological way to absolutely protect assets in an open system. MXP currently relies on the same model as world wide web does. If a better model is introduced it will be adopted. In practice this means that assets are delivered to all connected participants by the asset cache of a bubble over HTTP. Original assets are stored in an inventory of user or organization. When user creates an object he assigns his own inventory or an organization inventory to the object. The assigned inventory contains assets of the object. This inventory is then used by bubble to load the assets to local cache for further delivery to clients. In this scheme the asset distribution is load balanced through bubbles and inventory owners can control spread of their objects by limiting the bubbles which may access the inventory in question. Asset ids are all always assigned by inventories according to the proper UUID generation algorithm which will effectively remove threat of id collisions between assets from different inventories. See OpenSimulator AssetServer Proposal for detailed description of protocol proposal. - Tommi _______________________________________________ Opensim-dev mailing list Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev