PHP grid services status update

[John Hurliman]

Hi all,

I wanted to send out a quick status update before I leave town for the next few days. The purpose of this list is to discuss the development of the Open Metaverse Foundation's PHP grid services for virtual worlds and any related projects. There are currently three projects: SimianGrid, SimianGridFrontend, and the SimianGrid OpenSim connectors. SimianGrid is the set of web services that speak HTTP/JSON and use a MySQL/filesystem data backend to serve user accounts, inventory, assets, and spatial mapping for a world. SimianGridFrontend is a web interface that provides user registration, account management, and eventually grid administration tasks and web logins. The SimianGrid OpenSim connectors (not checked into SVN yet) are a set of classes in a C# library for OpenSim 0.7+ that allow an OpenSim region to talk to SimianGrid. It hasn't been started yet, but there will also be a web based installer similar to what you get with Wordpress or Mediawiki that will walk you through configuration and optionally convert an existing OpenSim grid database to the new format.

If you haven't checked out or committed to the repository yet, here are some links to get you started:

Project website: http://openmetaverse.googlecode.com/

Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/simian-dev

Contribution policy: http://code.google.com/p/openmetaverse/wiki/ContributionPolicy
  * The legalese is roughly equivalent to the OpenSim contribution policy, but this page also describes expectations from developers. For projects that are just getting off the ground and in a rapid development cycle we're not going to be excessively strict about the documentation and code formatting requirements, but you are expected to eventually clean up anything you are working on.

SimianGrid overview: http://code.google.com/p/openmetaverse/wiki/SimianGrid
  * In the diagram you can see the logic tier split into three components: core web services, external web services, and the capability router. The core web services are about 85% done (still need lots of testing though), no external web services are implemented yet, and the capability router is implemented but not hooked up to anything. The frontend website is SimianGridFrontend based on the CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com/) MVC framework. With a nice theme, a grid map, and a profile editing page I think SimianGridFrontend can become a full fledged grid web interface very quickly.

Demo server: http://grid.metaverseindustries.com/
  * The demo server is currently running the latest SVN code as of this evening. You can register a new account, login/logout, and should be able to do basic tasks like change your password. It's not much to look at, but on the back end this is calling the core web services to create a user account, identity, inventory, etc. The registration CAPTCHA and e-mail activation are turned off right now while I figure out how to setup them up properly on my Linux dev server.

jradford is working on the login XML-RPC, and when I get back on Tuesday I'll get back to work on finishing up the OpenSim connectors. The plan is to have the code ready for an alpha test with OpenSim sometime late next week.

Looking forward to lots of development in the near future,
John