Re: [ogpx] OGPX Charter+Intro ambiguity in Virtual World vs Virtual Worlds

[David W Levine <[e-mail]>]

Infinity mentioned this, and I thought I'd chime in and agree. The OGPX 
specifications are built to be incremental. All of the coding work I've 
done using early versions of the specs confirms this. In fact, the biggest 
challenge probably isn't going to be permitting incremental change and 
experimentation, but making sure that we put in enough (and not too much) 
stuff to manage the consequences of the flexibility. 

In general, the entire flavor of the specifications is "You start here, 
and you get handed back details about how the services you want to access 
are deployed. In particular, the capabilities mechanism is very good at 
permitting a deployment to map its services onto network endpoints as it 
sees fit. There are a few, necessarily fixed starting points, from which 
the dance begins, but, the overall pattern is authenticate, ask for 
services, and get handed short term use capabilities to access those 
services. Since the protocols and the design don't dictate any requirement 
that that the capabilities be serviced on the machine where a client made 
the request, we get a lot of flexibility. 

That said, we have no desire to re-create a general distributed computing 
fabric. The bulk of the specifications are about the bits we believe we 
need to move to support virtual worlds, not the details of moving those 
bits. There has been a fair bit of real thinking about how the design 
patterns are laid out so that you *could* deploy the protocol sequences 
over different messaging layers than the http(s)  The number of actual 
RESTish web service deployments over XMPP, RTP, or other plausible 
messaging oriented protocols is pretty small. My personal take is that we 
have covered most of the bases, but that any real world deployment of the 
OGPX specifications over  a protocol such as XMPP would require a specific 
RFC on the exact adaptation, and I wouldn't be shocked if it tripped over 
at least one hidden assumption in the current design. We're trying very 
hard to stay focused on specifying from working code, with an eye to the 
future, not the other way around. 

- David W. Levine
~ Zha Ewry (In Second Life)