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

From: Morgaine <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 07:51:31 +0000

What's the latest on Cable Beach, John?

We occasionally hear snippets of information about "working with John on
changes to Cable Beach" from various quarters, including LL (we are told),
realXtend, and Opensim, but it's hard to gain an overall perspective on
where CB is heading, whether there are conflicting interests pulling on its
design, if they're being resolved, and how it's all coming together.

Seeing as CB appears to be central to (or at least involved in) the future
of several projects, one of which is VWRAP, I expect that there is a lot of
interest in the evolution of its design.  The news page at
http://code.google.com/p/cablebeach/ shows that CB is indeed making good
progress (a new download yesterday!), but the CB mailing list is moribund
because all the interesting discussion occurs over IRC, which is hard to
reference retrospectively.  Are there archives?  It's difficult to get a
handle on what's happening currently unless one is permanently connected to
the IRC channel.

Be that as it may, I think that occasional outlines of the latest in design
thinking would help many people understand how CB is evolving as part of the
VW interop puzzle --- the realXtend mailing list is a poster child in that
respect, they're doing a great job.  Updates on the CB mailing list would
revive it nicely too, as it contains more spam than on-topic posts
currently. :-(

Keep up the good work! :-)

Morgaine.

===================================

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 3:01 AM, Hurliman, John <[email-masked]>wrote:

> 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.
>
> ---
> John
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