Re: [mmox] Creating walled gardens considered harmful

[Christian Scholz <[e-mail]>]

Hi!

Jon Watte schrieb:

> 
> If OGP was a pure service broker protocol (similar to a service bus, or 
> OSIDs), then we could probably find common ground -- but then, why not 
> use OSID, or one of the dozen or so similar service broker technologies 
> already available? Or, in fact, why not just expose a XML-RPC or SOAP 
> interface that returns an XML blob of defined schema that lists 
> named/typed services as URLs, and we're done?

That actually was part of my proposal in that we use a service discovery 
method as a foundation. This can be built using XRDS or similar means, 
the same thing OpenID already uses and which is planned for OAuth 
discovery (actually that's XRD but that's not yet published but should 
be similar).

This in fact gives you a simple XML document describing types (as URIs) 
and the service endpoints (URIs) for those types.

This document can then be either used to identify the services of a user 
(where is my profile, where is my friends list, where is my inventory) 
but also to identify the services supported by a individual virtual world.

> Once you start talking about higher-level functions like "OGP Teleport" 
> or having a client/viewer connect to simulation services, we immediately 
> run into significant political and technical challenges, where I don't 
> think there is actually a possibility of "one model fits all" or even 
> "one model fits most."

This might be the case in some far future but I agree that it definitely 
is not the case right now. A flexible services discovery framework would 
allow for all these to be used though and maybe sometime one protocol 
will emerge as some winner. Or maybe not ;-)

But for common services such as identity, profiles, assets, IM and 
others we might be able to actually find suitable protocols even today. 
For everything 3D it might not be the case.

I think I will write a somewhat longer description of that with use 
cases someday later when I have more time.

-- Christian



-- 
Christian Scholz
Blog: http://mrtopf.de/blog
Company: http://comlounge.net
Podcasts: http://datawithoutborders.net, http://openweb-podcast.de