[Opensim-dev] OGPX and IETF-ing things

[Toni Alatalo]

On Jun 3, 2009, at 10:37 PM, Cristina Videira Lopes wrote:

> Personally, I think this is all premature. IETF-ing the Hypergrid is
> premature for different reasons than IETF-ing OGP is premature. The

I think that depends on what is meant by IETF-ing. For proposing as a 
standard, you are most probably correct. But starting to discuss 
something within the IETF doesn't mean there's a ready proposal for a 
standard - perhaps just an idea of the need, a set of requirements and 
some early implementation. For example a working group can then discuss 
based on those.

So if mr. Hamrick's proposal is about having the discussion on a 
different forum, one which is vendor neutral and independent of any 
specific implementations, I think it's worth considering. It kind of 
sounds sensible to focus on OpenSim specific development on this list.. 
And many of the points (quoted at the bottom) that you made in your 
post sounds like something that other people working with other 
implementations might be interested in.

I do appreciate your point also that it doesn't seem attractive to 
participate in extra talks when what is needed is more experience and 
visible issues with the implementations, but just wanted to hilight 
that other point of view.

> The right thing to do, I think, is to first have implementations of
> both OGP and the Hypergrid2 in OpenSim. Once that is in place, we can
> all see the similarities and differences, and try to standardize the

Sounds right to me in any case, no matter where the related discussions 
are to be held.

Here am quoting some of your points that seemed to be of general 
interest..

> that are substantially different. Things like posting/retrieving
> agents to/from regions, for example, we already converged to using
> REST; inventory access, we already converged to using capability  URLs
(...)
> authority: what component has authority to do what. In OGP regions
> are still the ones doing agent transfers, therefore implying a trust
> relation between interacting grids that must be established in some
> non-technical manner (i.e. the receiving region trusts that the
> sending region is not stealing the user's identity). In the
> Hypergrid, agent transfers between non-trusting regions are done on
> the client side, so that the identity of the user can always be
> verified, there is no region in the middle acting on behalf of anyone.
> Crista

~Toni