[Opensim-dev] Asset Server Rest Interface Roundup

[Tleiades Hax]

>
> > will import/export of multiple formats be embedded in the mime
> > encoding of the incoming asset creation request?
>
> That's a good question.  I think that until we firm up on at least one
> official format (which is probably post 0.5) the question is sort of
> moot.  I think it's a good thing to think about though.
>
>
Currently we don't use MIME, and I have not seen an example of a REST web
service using mime. Of course that doesn't prevent us from using MIME, I
would not advocate using MIME as a transport format.

Currently the assets server ships all data as "application/xml", and the
binary information is converted to base 64 encoding. I would suggest we stay
with this format, with but a few modifications. The primary change I would
suggest is to handle the fact that base 64 is a pretty inefficient format to
use when transporting binary information, especially considering that HTTP
is a 8 bit per byte protocol. I would suggets that when assets exceeds a
certain size - which needs to be determined experimentally - we gzip the xml
data, and transmit raw binary information in the HTTP body.

I.e. when assets size is less  than some cutoff we ship "application/xml",
otherwise we ship "application/gzip+xml".

Unfortunately the mono implementation of GZipStream is buggy, so we cannot
use that, the only other native implementation of GZip I have found is GPL
with a pretty confusing FLOSS exception (Adam doesn't like it). This means
that this compression feature must wait until we either:

a) Find a better gzip implentation
b) The mono GZipStream patch gets into common usage
c) we implement our own gzip stream.

/tleiades
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