ImageService

As of 10/12/2008 there is a new gforge project called "Region Image Service". As the name says, it extends regions with the ability to serve images onto the web. The only images allowed out this way are those whose keys can be found in the DataSnapshot xml files, i.e. images related to things marked for search in the region. No other image key is served. The interface is as follows:

http://domain:port/?method=image&key=

This service is intended to be used in conjunction with search facilities, be them the new intra-grid search (http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/ossearch/) or external search engines like Metaverse Ink Search (http://metaverseink.com), so that explicitly marked, rich 2D content can be shared within a grid and/or with the whole world.

To see an example, try this: http://webi.metaverseink.com/opensim/results.jsp?query=irvine&mode=all&submit=Search Those images are being served from regions connected to OSGrid; you can access them directly like this, for example: http://osl2.nac.uci.edu:9006/index.php?method=image&key=84a84adb-819a-44ec-a7a2-b5323e737c24 Try other keys, to see what the service does. (service available only until the opensim in that machine crashes :-)

The project is here: http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/image-service/

There are pre-packaged binary releases at: http://forge.opensimulator.org/svn/image-service/tags Please see README.txt for instructions.

Comments, suggestions, contributions welcome!

ImageService and http://secondlife.com/app/image/
As a reference, this Image Service does the same function as http://secondlife.com/app/image/ (e.g. http://secondlife.com/app/image/79793601-a4d1-f456-8e1e-8d4f3bb977c2/2)

The 2 main differences are:


 * Linden Lab serves all images onto the web, whereas this Image Service narrows that down considerably.
 * Linden Lab's image service is centralized, whereas this one is decentralized among the regions. Region administrators control it.