[Opensim-dev] Public Release of (free) OpenLibraryGrid OpenSim API framework

[Sean McNamara]

Hi,


On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 3:35 AM, Gajananan Kugamoorthy
<gajananan_k at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> OpenLibraryGrid (OLG) is a free OpenSim API framework for fast prototyping
> and distributed deployment of advanced scientific and engineering
> applications in virtual worlds. In our quest to provide OpenSim content
> authors with flexible and easy to use ways to implement complex virtual
> world based applications, we have been strongly committed to the development
> of tools that address the common concerns of venturing into the utilization
> of new technologies. As the culmination of an endeavor that started with our
> previous development tools (OpenLibrary and OpenAppCore), OLG represents our
> most solid contribution to the virtual world community, encompassing all of
> our experience in this exciting area.

Free as in beer, not as in freedom, right? I haven't been able to find
any source code, just a binary download.

If you have a maintenance plan for these libraries, and will update it
frequently to keep it working with the latest OpenSim APIs, that's
great. Otherwise, the binaries will cease to work properly (either at
build-time or runtime, depending on linkage) as soon as one of the
OpenSim APIs changes signature (provided OLG calls that API, of
course). Most developers I know would rather have the ability to use
the latest opensim release or git master, and that would not be
possible if we are tied to a specific OpenSim API as depended upon by
OLG. OpenSim is still under very active development, and things can
and do change (e.g. even between releases 0.7.0.2 and 0.7.1 there were
significant breaking changes).

That said, several successful developers maintain active codebases
that depend on OpenSim APIs. A great example is Diva's d2, which
contains a lot of useful features that are not included in the OpenSim
codebase. But because of Diva's attention to detail; frequent
maintenance of the Diva distro; and the open-source nature of the
code; the community has plenty of confidence that d2 will be
maintained and remain compatible with the latest OpenSim API as it
evolves. And even if Diva stops maintaining it (as unfortunate as that
would be!) volunteers could still take her code and build upon it, to
keep the maintenance alive.

I haven't seen any source code or statements about your intentions to
release source code, so I believe that your project will not integrate
very well into the development model of most OpenSim users and
developers. Hopefully you will consider the option of releasing your
code under an open source license. The most natural choice would be
the BSD license, which we use for OpenSim; but personally I wouldn't
complain if you used a different license, as long as you don't violate
the terms of either your code's license or OpenSim's license by
linking OpenSim with your code.

Last question: Do you have any kind of API reference for OLG?
Something of a similar purpose and presentation as the Java SE API
docs offered by Oracle, or the .NET Framework docs on MSDN? I saw a
bunch of tutorials on the OLG wiki, but nothing that seemed to
completely document the classes and methods of the assemblies you've
shipped. Another downside to the closed-source nature of the code is
that no one can inspect the code to understand it, so you pretty much
have to provide comprehensive documentation for the binaries to be
useful at all.



>
> OpenLibraryGrid provides the necessary functionality to create and
> manipulate a very diverse set of virtual entities (objects, avatars, etc.)
> and the ability to distribute such functionality over several virtual world
> regions, endowing developers with the capacity of creating extremely
> flexible solutions.
> Website: http://www.prendingerlab.net/globallab/technology/openlibrarygrid/

"...over several virtual world regions". Were you aware of
MegaSimulators (or MegaRegions, I guess) at the time that you were
designing this? What about the recent work enabling the creation of
arbitrary-sized regions? These are two ways that the community has
devised to aid in coping with the limitations of the traditional
65,536 sqm region, and I think both solutions have their pros and
cons. Did you evaluate them and toss them out, or are you using one of
these solutions, or did you do something completely different?


Anyway, thanks for the freeware, and I hope it'll be free software (as
in freedom, not price) sometime in the future.


Sean

>
> Other related software (MPML3D, EML) can be found at:
> http://www.prendingerlab.net/globallab/technology/
>
> Demo videos of applications based on OLG and predecessor technologies can be
> found at:
> http://www.youtube.com/user/prendingerlab
>
> Helmut Prendinger (Principal Investigator)
> Arturo Nakasone (Project Manager)
>
> National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo
> Global Lab Project Website: http://www.prendingerlab.net/globallab/
> Homepage: http://research.nii.ac.jp/~prendinger/
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