Subject: [mmox] Rough draft of the Cable Beach Core protocol is online

From: "Hurliman, John" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 21:01:44 -0600

http://code.google.com/p/cablebeach/wiki/CableBeachCore1_0

>From the Cable Beach website:

Introduction

Virtual worlds are made up of a complex stack of services that operate together to deliver a complete immersive experience. The approach that virtual worlds have taken so far is to build an entire vertical stack of services including user account management, content distribution servers, inventory hosting, simulation servers, simulation coordinators, and more. As virtual worlds grow in both popularity and complexity, it is no longer always desirable to only build so-called "walled gardens" of services. Cable Beach provides the glue to bind virtual world services together, whether they exist alongside one another in a data center or across the Internet run by different administrators that have no preexisting relationship. The primary focus of the architecture is on the following:

    * Let service providers specialize in what they do best. To address the growing scalability demands of the web, service providers have evolved into providing narrow but high quality services. You wouldn't expect a social network to also provide the best search engine service on the web.
    * Use existing standards. Many of the challenges in virtual worlds are broad issues that are also being addressed by the web community. Instead of creating new parallel solutions, Cable Beach attempts to leverage as much existing technology as it can to enable better compatibility with other architectures, both today and in the future.
    * Give virtual world administrators more flexibility, not less. No use case is viewed as more or less valid than another, and the system does not favor any particular setup. Building a walled garden is just as easy as building a completely decentralized world, or any combination of the two. 

The core of Cable Beach is the definition of a world service, a virtual world login protocol, and a standard method of defining virtual world services. The implementation available at this site consists of a server for a world service and another server for assets and filesystem services. Initially, this implementation is targeting compatibility with the OpenSim project using a custom OpenSim extension called ModCableBeach. Additional connectors for other virtual world systems are in the planning phase.

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John