0.7 Planning

Release 0.7 will be the first one featuring the completed major refactoring and rearchitecting work that happened during the second half of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. This work targeted mainly the resource services and servers previously known as UGAIM. These servers have been replaced by one single server shell called ROBUST which can now run any combination of services in it. The services themselves have been reconceptualized; we now have the following set of main services:


 * Assets -- the asset store
 * Authentication -- passwords and auth tokens
 * Authorization -- access control
 * Avatar -- the carcass, formerly known as "avatar appearance"
 * FreeSwitch -- voice
 * Friends -- social net
 * Grid -- maps map locations to IPs and regions
 * Grid User -- grid-local information about users
 * Inventory -- the inventory store
 * Login -- the login service
 * Presence -- tracks where in the grid user agents are
 * Profile (Basic) -- user profiles
 * User Accounts -- administrative info about users

The simulators access these services through abstract interfaces, therefore being isolated from implementation details. The services can now be seamlessly instantiated in any process, namely ROBUST server shells and the simulators processes themselves, which means that we have complete reuse of code between standalone and grid configurations. The specification is done in configuration files (.ini). Moreover, access to remote services is also seamlessly achieved through the instantiation of stubs (aka service connectors); again, the specification of which stubs the simulators use is done externally in configuration files (.ini) -- this allows for alternative third-party implementations of the resource service infrastructure, of which there is already one (SimianGrid).